Review: "Dixon & Daughters"

When I visited London in 2008 I went to the National Theatre where I saw Jeremy Irons in a great play called Never So Good (I even blogged about it here).

On my most recent trip I went back to the National Theatre and saw another, more intimate play called Dixon and Daughters -- an intense, very British working class family drama about the deep trauma of generational abuse. 

Staged in a tiny part of the National called the Dorfman Theatre, Dixon is about an elderly woman named Mary who returns home after a short stint in prison. She had pled guilty to a minor crime committed by one of her troubled daughters -- meanwhile her other daughter has a troubled daughter of her own. There's also another woman named Briana who has infiltrated and created trouble in this family's life because she knows their deep dark secret that they want to keep hidden at all costs (literally hidden by rug over a patch of blood-stained carpet).

It's a dark, brutally unsentimental play about generations of women, dealing with the harm committed against them by men and each other, trapped in a world of near-poverty they can never escape, trying to find some kind of inner peace.

A relatively short play (only 90 minutes with an intermission), the cast featured an excellent cast of British theater actors who you really believe are they people they portray. Dixon and Daughters reminded me of a shorter, British version of August: Osage County and also of the movies of the brilliant director Mike Leigh who tells wonderful stories of working-class lives (Secrets and Lies and Another Year are very similar to this play). 

While not a great play, it was certainly interesting and it's a reminder of who wonderful and powerful the theater can be, especially in London. Despite Brexit and the unending soap-opera of the royal family, a play like this is a reminder that theater is perhaps the UK's greatest cultural export.

By the way, while sitting in a small waiting area for the play to start, a great British actress Harriet Walter strode into the National and I managed to get a quick picture of her. She's been seen recently on Succession, Ted Lasso, and The Crown and has had a long career in British theater and TV.  It was an honor to see a bit of British theater along with one of its greatest thespians.