Park Theatre, til 31 August 2024

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Urgent drama delves unapologetically into women’s trauma.

One in four women will be raped in their lifetimes. As our protagonist Tara tells us in When it Happens to You, we all know someone who’s been raped – a mother, sister, colleague or the woman in the next seat along in the theatre. It’s a shockingly common experience for women, and yet we struggle to tell and hear these stories. When it Happens to You tackles this discomfort head on. Tara is a writer – in fact, she’s the fictional stand-in for the play’s writer, Tawni O’Dell, on whose real experience the story is based. But even Tara can’t find the right words when her daughter Esme is raped; Esme has to be the one to urge her mother to label the crime appropriately: “Say it mom. I was raped.” Esme’s trauma forces Tara (and we, the audience) to acknowledge the crime of rape, no matter the discomfort, and in turn this causes Tara to confront some of her own demons. 

When it Happens to You is an urgent and dense one-act play, and it begins by plunging us into the immediate aftermath of Esme’s attack. In the middle of a friendly family dinner with her other child, the college-aged Connor, Tara gets a call a desperate, keening phone call from Esme who explains that she’s just been raped by a stranger in her own apartment. The play is immediately confronting in these opening moments, as the waif-thin, almost childlike Esme cries “I couldn’t make him leave.” It’s the fallout of this devastating attack that forms the play’s narrative, as we watch how Esme’s life is irrevocably changed by what has happened to her.

Thought it is Esme’s story that’s unfolding in front of us, we see it entirely through Tara’s eyes. Tara addresses the audience directly, narrating the plot scene for scene. She jumps fluidly between interacting with her fellow characters and conversing with us. Though having a character simply vocalise their inner monologue isn’t the most sophisticated storytelling technique, it’s effective here because the play is deliberately favouring Tara’s perspective over Esme’s in order to examine the ripple effect of male sexual violence. As the therapist Tara reluctantly attends has to explain to her – what happened to her daughter also happened to her. Exploring the rape through Tara’s lens also allows us to gradually learn more about her own unresolved issues (deliberately masked behind stoicism and sarcasm). Even as Tara tells us about Esme’s spiralling drinking, she knowingly jokes about lying to the doctor about her own alcohol intake. Esme and Tara clash and mirror each other in equal measure, meaning that even amongst the seriousness of the material, there’s a beautiful depiction of the mother-daughter bond.

When it Happens to You gets better as it goes along. When the early scenes focused on the hospital and the investigating detective, I was worried it was going to turn into a police procedural. It’s such an urgently told story, zipping from scene to scene so quickly, that at first it seems as though it’s being played as a thriller. I’m always slightly skeptical of the use of sexual violence in storytelling in this way; done well it can be exceptional, but too often it feels like it’s used cheaply as a shortcut for the most horrible thing the writer could think of to subject a female character to. Thankfully, When it Happens to You doesn’t make this mistake, and as it goes on it only becomes more insightful and thoughtful. And more affecting – essentially we are seeing Esme (and by maternal extension, Tara) descend to her lowest depths. It’s hard to watch, but an important depiction of how impactful this kind of violence is on the women who fall victim to it. 

The staging of this play is simple but effective. Zahra Mansouri’s set is almost completely bare, save for a vague city backdrop that conveys the cold, unfeeling urban jungle Esme tries to grapple with after the rape. It’s lit with coloured strips that change according to the mood of the scene and help signal the shift between Tara’s interactions with her fellow characters and her interactions with us – a clever trick from lighting designer Sherry Coenen. With no props on stage, director Jez Bond has the cast moving freely around the space – sometimes circling each other or facing off from a distance. It works well, and is well performed by an excellent cast. The standouts are Rosie Day as Esme, conveying both her vulnerability and her inner steel, and Amanda Abbington as Tara. Even in such a short play, it’s a feat to keep the audience engaged when one character’s voice is so heavily favoured. Abbington pulls it off with aplomb. 

Watching a play about rape is hard going. But When it Happens to You invites us to question how much of our repulsion at the crime itself is transferred to the women who experience it, causing them to feel they cannot tell their stories. This play is an important and compelling depiction of too many women’s lives.