ajhlovestheatre

THE SMILE OF HER

by Christine Lahti

directed by Mêlisa Annis

Marylebone Theatre, London – until 29 August 2026

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://www.marylebonetheatre.com

Traumatic family history and a feminist call to arms are fused together with urgency and unexpected elegance in Christine Lahti’s self-penned show. The Smile Of Her is at once a memoir, a cry of pain and a warning. The Emmy, Golden Globe and Oscar winner brings her not-quite solo play to London following a couple of well received seasons in American regional theatres, and while the performer and the locations evoked are from the other side of the Atlantic, the themes are universal.

Lahti looks back with a sardonic, humorous eye on her affluent Michigan upbringing as one of six children born to an esteemed surgeon and his soignée but complicated wife. Patriarch Paul was chauvinistic, controlling and emotionally absent, with a capacity for cruelty that is chiling in the retelling, particularly because, at least initially, Lahti’s recounting is so matter-of-fact. Not for long though, as family skeletons come tumbling out of the closet (and some of the stories are as gruelling to listen to as they must be to perform) and Lahti also recalls encounters, as a fledgling actress, with predatory men that range from the disrespectful to the downright horrible. She plays herself but with a change of stance and variation in vocal tone suggests her brittle mother, her overbearing father, troubled siblings etc. She doesn’t fully disappear into these other figures, instead providing sketches that are just vivid enough to give us a strong impression of who these people are.

Two alternating young actresses (Isabella Ford at the performance I caught) play  Christine as a child, and if the idea of the leading player conversing with her youthful self sounds like it could get a little syrupy, The Smile Of Her manages mostly to side step the saccharine psychobabble. Lahti is a warm, assured presence and, as the show progresses, an increasingly spellbinding storyteller. She commands the stage and our attention by stealth; at first she seems almost too sophisticated and well-adjusted, drawing the audience in like an old friend, but she is utterly compelling as she charts the fissures in her tormented family, and the multiple ways men abuse power. Her embrace of the Womens Liberation movement becomes not so much understandable as completely essential.

The text, based on Lahti’s book of collected essays True Stories From An Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming Of Age, is crisp, engrossing and accessible. Thematically, the idea of a woman looking back at her tricky relationship with a flawed father recalls Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and the transporting musical that it inspired. There is something refreshing and ultimately almost unbearably moving though about the journey Lahti goes on from deriding her mother for what she perceived as complicity in a marriage that any self-respecting feminist would balk at, to appreciating that resistance and resilience can take many forms. The ‘smile’ of the play’s title is that of Lahti’s mother and, honestly, as tributes to Elizabeth Margaret Tabar Lahti might go, this really is beautiful, even as it is clear-eyed and occasionally harrowing.

Mêlisa Annis directs with an unshowy precision and clarity that serve the writing and the star exquisitely. There’s a quiet magic to the way objects and bodies suddenly appear in the spaces on Sarah Beaton’s clinical, neon-fringed set, like memories popping out of the subconscious. The effective lighting is by Matt Haskins. David Gregory’s soundscape and Matt Powell’s video designs are unobtrusively impressive. The stylish restraint of the production overall throws the more shocking elements of the text into even sharper relief.

Lahti combines star power and humanity to winning effect. This is a deceptively potent piece of theatre. Thought-provoking, mature yet gripping and, finally, pretty devastating, this deserves to find an extensive London audience.