Es & Flo - Old Fitz Theatre

Es & Flow

The Old Fitz Theatre

At this year’s Mardi Gras season, the Old Fitz Theatre continues its welcome habit of programming intimate queer storytelling. Jennifer Lunn’s Es & Flo sits squarely in that lineage – an ensemble work about devotion, ideology, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive time.

Set in Cardiff, Es and Flo have secretly been in a relationship since they met at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s. Now 71, Es’s memory is fading, and her unseen son Peter is attempting to separate the couple - first by introducing an unannounced carer, with the longer-term goal of moving his mother into residential care. Around this central relationship orbit Es’s daughter-in-law Catherine, the home help Beata, and Beata’s daughter Kasia, performed by Annie Byron, Eloise Snape, Fay Du Chateau, Erika Ndibe, Charlotte Salusinszky and Georgina Warren-Nwokol. Each character operates within some form of protective fiction - romantic, ideological, medical or social - and the drama emerges as those fictions begin to fracture.

Though Es and Flo are fictional, the historical movement that binds them is very real. On 5 September 1981, 36 Welsh women marched from Cardiff as “Women for Life on Earth” in protest against the British government’s decision to store cruise missiles on UK soil. They arrived at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire and established what became the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Within a year, more than 30,000 women had camped and demonstrated on site, creating one of the most significant feminist protest movements of the twentieth century. The play gestures toward that radicalism - women creating autonomous space, rejecting patriarchal authority, and forging community outside the state.

The production’s white box (Designer Soham Apte) set briefly springs to life during scene transitions with blurred archival footage of the era, reminding us of the scale of that collective action. Yet Es & Flo is less interested in reconstructing protest than in examining what happens after revolution - how ideals age inside ordinary domestic life. The question haunting the play is quietly devastating: what becomes of political certainty when memory itself becomes unreliable?

Deceptively sweet, this domestic drama hits many of the painful beats of dementia storytelling. As Flo struggles to accept outside help, it becomes clear there is no right answer or easy option even without financial strain even being a factor. We recognise how hard it can be to watch a loved one slip away, and how powerful the desire not to become a burden can be.

I found the thread of story supplied by Beata the Polish home care worker and her 9 year old daughter striking.  Neither Beata or Kasia invests in preserving Greenham’s mythology. Kasia shifts the drama from memory to continuity - from what these women once changed to what simply endures. Beata anchors it in material reality. As the migrant carer whose labour sustains their independence, she lives inside the systems they once resisted; her politeness and efficiency reads less as personality than necessity. Through her, the play reframes its politics: the legacy of revolution is not only the freedom to love openly, but the quiet reliance on others whose care makes that freedom liveable.

Directed by Emma Canalese, the production at its best captures the intimacy of two people negotiating history in real time - a negotiation as emotional as it is factual. However, an uneven approach to accents distracts from emotional continuity; voices drift in and out of region and age, occasionally pulling the audience out of the world just as it begins to settle. Similarly, the tempo rarely shifts gear. Scenes accumulate at a comparable rhythm, and, without sharper dynamic variation, the play’s structural revelations lose impact. What should feel like ruptures barely arrive.

There is also an uneasy tension in the portrayal of diminished capacity. Watching an actor in their seventies embody a character losing agency raises complicated questions - not about ability, but about how vulnerability is staged. At times the depiction leans toward representational shorthand, creating moments where the audience becomes aware of performance rather than personhood. The play invites empathy; occasionally the staging prompts distance.

Lunn writes with a gentle wit that never entirely leaves her characters, even in decline. The play’s central idea - that memory is both sanctuary and distortion - feels particularly resonant in queer history, where personal testimony often substitutes for institutional record.

Eloise Snape anchors this conceptual terrain effectively, with a particularly strong performance. She navigates a character defined by class awareness and economic authority, constructing a careful social mask: measured voice, managerial composure, the confidence of someone accustomed to control. As the play progresses, that composure thins. Snape allows tiny cracks to appear - hesitation before a name, a laugh held half a beat too long - until it becomes clear the authority, she wields is also a defence as she faces the truth about her own life and marriage. Her eventual recognition that she too is living inside a constructed narrative lands as the production’s most affecting moment.

Still, Es & Flo remains a thoughtful inclusion in the Mardi Gras program: a work less about queer identity as declaration than queer history as memory - fragile, revisable and shared. By the final moments, the play suggests that love may be the only truth surviving the collapse of all others - not factual truth, not ideological truth, but relational truth: the story two people agree to keep telling together, even when one may no longer remember how it began.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image: Robert Catto