There’s an immediate frisson of friction between the two characters – a teacher and a mother – in this hour-long, real-time conversation. It’s not long before we find out why: the mother (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) accuses the teacher (Beth Allen) of having an affair with her husband.

Cue one-upmanship (one-upwomanship?), and a handful of funny lines, cliches and revelations as they score points off each other with mounting accusations.

The teacher judges the mother’s pre-judgement: “Everything I say to you is going to seem young or stupid or whatever it is you think I am.” [More]

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The tension was palpable from the start. Between the Sheets opens with a go-getting high-flying power suit-wearing woman Marion (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) grilling her son’s teacher Teresa (Beth Allen) on his successes, failures, weaknesses and future. 

The beauty of Canadian playwright Jordi Mand’s writing is that we think we know the premise of the show, fraught with drama and conflict, but very quickly realise that this is not the case. The subsequent beautifully crafted dialogue skilfully tips a seesaw of emotion and power through repeated bombshells of revelation. [More]

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Between the Sheets is a gripping, piercingly well-executed and complex piece of theatre where two women are stripped bare as their lives are wrenched open by their most unlikely opposite.  

The piece is set in a year 3 classroom, at the end of a parent teacher evening. Career woman Marion (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) enters the classroom late, smoothly claims the last spot from Teresa (Beth Allen), her son’s young teacher. Though tired, not expecting her and about to go home, Teresa agrees to answer a few quick questions. What follows is Marion’s extraction of a confession from Teresa that will leave them both irreparably changed. 

The classroom is brought wonderfully to life by designer Jane Hakaraia, makes a colourful and incongruous backdrop for the two women to battle it out and adds hugely to the tone of realism that the piece exudes. You feel like a fly on the wall. 

This is Canadian writer Jordi Mand’s first play, and it is testament to the strength of the writing that Ward-Lealand saw the play while in Toronto and promptly snapped up the rights to produce it in New Zealand. The plot is gripping and glides away from what we’d expect as the constant power shifts and revelations make each character believable, complex and also sympathetic.

Both women fight their case, stake their claim, but we are on neither of their sides, as they are in turn cruel and shockingly honest with each other. Despite the fact they both want the same thing, there is a deep compassion between them – there is a bizarre hope by the end that somehow it will all work out. This is testament to the powerful acting, as well as Sophie Roberts’ direction that keeps the physicality of the play alive and taut. Despite being a discussion set in one room, it is mesmerising.

However, work out it cannot. And the final revelation of why Marion has done what she has is deeply human. We feel for both for her and Teresa. Nothing is fixed, and yet all has been, irreversibly, undone.  

This is a powerful, clever piece by a talented all-woman team. Receiving rave reviews wherever it goes, this production of Between the Sheets lives up to the play’s reputation. 

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