“Evening All Afternoon” at Donmar Warehouse

Maryam Philpott in the West End
★★★☆☆
26 February 2026

Anna Ziegler’s new play at the Donmar Warehouse feels like a series of discontinued thoughts, the same truncated thoughts that co-protagonist Jennifer has in the opening moments of Evening All Afternoon as she describes grasping for words and phrases that remain elusive. And as a result, Ziegler’s play about grief and motherhood tries to do too many things at the same time, drawing in lightly explored mental health challenges, a predatory university environment, the pandemic, and generational miscommunication. With some of these themes acting as a catalyst for the action and others as both motivation and consequences, Ziegler loses sight of a much cleaner two-hander.

Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

When Delilah meets her new stepmother for the first time shortly before the wedding, she is far from impressed with Jennifer’s modesty or the simple life she has led. Comparing Jennifer to her vibrant mother precipitates a crisis in both their lives and as the man who connects them becomes distracted by work, the women are left alone in the same house with no common ground.

Ziegler structures Evening All Afternoon as two intersecting monologues with some dramatized scenarios, giving the audience a chance to see both sides of the story. Except, Delilah and Jennifer are not telling quite the same story, creating unevenness across this 85-minute piece as their narratives move in opposite directions. That could work if Delilah’s trajectory was less broadly constructed, and Ziegler had used this structural shape to comment on their respective emotional maturity or degree of self-absorption, but instead the overloading of ideas creates a sense of distraction that Diyan Zora’s premiere production is never able to shake.

The central premise is a strong one, asking whether compassion depends on relatability viewed through the contrasting losses experienced by Jennifer and Delilah – the former particularly well drawn as an embittered mother–daughter dynamic is revealed – but the writing is overly reliant on soapy shocks that are out of place in the small, domestic drama that Ziegler has crafted. Some throwaway references to an inappropriate tutor come to nothing while the sudden onset of violent psychosis later in the play is insufficiently seeded. There is a much stronger story in here about the long impacts of grief on vulnerable people and the different ways it can manifest, bringing Delilah and Jennifer closer together.

It is well staged by Zora on Basia Bińkowska’s expressionistic set, creating a fairly timeless and stateless setting that underpins the play’s more universal themes on the nature of parental and biological bonds, although the Covid references in the text make it seem dated and unnecessarily specific. Erin Kellyman has the showier role as Delilah, a sulky young adult needing guidance and care more than she’d admit but suffering a painful decline as she becomes more isolated. Anastasia Hille’s Jennifer is restrained but no less impressive as an ordinarily decent woman grappling with a big change much later in life than she imagined.

There is more to mine here in the absent presence of Delilah’s father who is also Jennifer’s husband, and while Evening All Afternoon is a female-centric play, two women both trying to love the same man in different ways while reconciling their own maternal role models was really all this play needed to be.