A Beginner’s Guide to Widowhood is a tragi-comedy about carrying on in the wake of life-shattering loss.
A Beginner’s Guide to Widowhood, originally created by Omar Khan and written by Rae Mainwaring, is on at The Lion & Unicorn through 5 September. It is a heartfelt portrait of a mother’s struggle to pick up the pieces after the destabilising loss of her husband. Regardless of personal experience with all-consuming grief, A Beginner’s Guide to Widowhood is a visceral and moving experience, likely to make entire audiences laugh and cry.
Suria, played by Liz Jadav, has only just lost her husband, Dan, when she decides to take their teenage children on a family holiday to Türkiye. Much to the annoyance of her children, Suria brings along an outdated guidebook, a constant and comforting reminder of her former life and former plans with her late husband. But even without the book, she quickly realises, everything reminds her of him. Suria and her children cannot take a holiday from loss.
Over the course of the one-woman production, directed by Andrew Breakwell, Suria encounters various faces and forms of her grief. She slips between reality, imagination and memory, while narrating the goings-on both inside and outside of her head. Reminders of her husband are constant. The wrong song from a beachside radio evokes a particularly painful memory and prompts public collapse. Reminders of the past are as painful as reminders of the future she must now face alone.
A Beginner’s Guide to Widowhood tackles some of the more obvious tropes of grief. There are meditations on the familiar platitudes that comfort the deliverer, not the mourner. Suria obsesses over the potency of words; she and her kids make a game of naming the idioms that can be used to skirt the collective discomfort with the word death. The discomfort with the word, Suria explains, becomes discomfort with anyone associated with it. She fears the isolation that can result from the growing chasm of loss that now divides her and the general population. The only true connection she finds is with the strangers she imagines, or confirms, to have intimate understanding. The importance of shared experience is laid bare.
At the same time, A Beginner’s Guide to Widowhood offers more original insight. Its exploration of the relationship between a surviving parent and two teenage children who are grieving in tandem, is unique and powerful. Suria’s children raise the stakes of her instability, and expose how the nature of age, time, and relationship can complicate shared loss. The play also poignantly portrays death as the loss of life both lived and unlived. Suria mourns the memories that she and Dan never got to make as much as the ones she can’t get back.
The production itself is not quite as strong as its ideas. The flashbacks that disrupt the linear structure are effective in reflecting Suria’s unstable reality, but at times cross into genuine plot confusion. Jadav’s acting is compelling but inconsistent. Transitions are clunky and there are perhaps one too many supporting characters for the audience to catalogue. Despite her best efforts, Jadav can do only so much differentiation with accent and character work. Setting is established almost exclusively via ambient sound, another effective tool that could be wielded more intentionally.
This show runs at Lion & Unicorn Theatre until 5th September. Tickets here.