Review: Pass the Parcel at the Royal Court Studio ****

Families are funny things, and their dynamics can be incomprehensible to outsiders – and indeed sometimes to family members too.

These complex, tangled relationships form the heart of Sarah Whitehead’s Pass the Parcel, an all-female four-hander currently receiving its premiere at the Royal Court Studio.

Whitehead, a graduate of the theatre’s writers’ development programme, had a short play in the Court’s Stocking Fillers festive show last December.

And like The Christmas List, in which Lynn Francis’ harassed and belittled shopper fell for Santa in a lift, Pass the Parcel, Whitehead's debut full-length script, deals with fractured relationships and fragmented memories in decidedly surreal fashion.

Lily Gray has just passed away. Once a vibrant member of the community she has been declining with dementia, and her death leaves a hairdresser’s salon and a trio of daughters who it seems can barely stand to be in the same room together.

Forced into close proximity with each other, a misbehaving CD player and a mysterious multi-layered missive from their recently departed mum, the trio – mystic Mona (Jessica May Buxton who reminds of Doon Mackichan), prickly Lindsay (Hayley Sheen) and adrift youngest Kelly (Katie Erich) – strip away the parcel’s paper to uncover items which send them hurtling down a time-travelling memory lane… facing and unpicking the moments that derailed their once-close knit sisterhood along the way.

Above: Pamela (Eithne Brown) and Lindsay (Hayley Sheen). Top: Sheen, Jessica May Buxton as Mona and Katie Erich as Kelly. Photos by Atanas Paskalev.

Love, rivalry, grudges - the reasons for some being lost in the mists of time, schisms, moving on and getting left behind, community, a sense of belonging and ultimately redemption are all explored in Whitehead’s otherworldly tragicomedy.

With Lily never more than a shadowy background figure – and the sisters’ unnamed father even more so – the motherly-shaped hole is filled by Eithne Browne’s warm-but-eccentric Pamela, beating heart and perfect coiffeur of Our Lady’s, the local Catholic church where all Gray family hatches, matches and despatches take place. It's an ideal role for Browne who is particularly adept at kindly but ever so slightly unhinged characters.

She and Buxton – who clearly relishes the ridiculous pronouncements of her free-spirited celestial guru Mona (while offering a hint of the desperation beneath), are responsible for the bulk of the comedy ying to the yang of tragedy for a family which has become lost, while Sheen and Erich move Benjamin Button-like towards youthful optimism from adult woes.

The cast work together very smoothly as an ensemble, despite all of them having been laid low with the lurgi in the final week of rehearsals which led to the show's opening night being cancelled.

While one or two plot lines are introduced then left unresolved - it's not clear whether deliberately or not, overall Pass the Parcel is well-structured and certainly never less than entertaining, and Whitehead has both an evident understanding of human dynamics and a keen ear for a nifty one-liner.