PLAY REVIEW: After Sunday ★★

Sophia Griffin’s debut play, After Sunday, is rich with emotional potential, but under Corey Campbell’s direction it often feels like a meal only half‑cooked.

The concept is affecting: Naomi (Aimee Powell), an occupational therapist, leads a Caribbean cooking group with three men in a medium‑secure hospital — Ty (Corey Weekes), Leroy (David Webber) and Daniel (Darrel Bailey). Memory, identity and trauma swirl in the steam of dumplings and plantain; the idea that food can be a conduit for healing is never less than compelling. 

And yet, although the performances are often fine; Powell invests Naomi with warmth, Weekes sometimes offers genuine moments of sparkle, Webber and Bailey bring commendable commitment, the production is too frequently let down by a lack of directorial precision. Scenes that could have been visceral become languid; the emotional peaks feel neither earned nor properly framed. The transitions between memory and present, plus humour and pain, are abrupt or glacial in places, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh, reflect, or brace for what’s coming.

Campbell’s staging seems caught between wanting intimacy and spectacle. The live cooking onstage is visually pleasing, and the sensory detail quite vivid, but there is a sense that the smell of food is used as padding rather than propulsion. Direction has a responsibility to sculpt pace, to shepherd the tension, and here that responsibility is only half met. In several key moments, Naomi’s drive to evoke Sunday dinners and communal solace collapses into platitude. The stakes of lives constrained by a secure hospital are high; yet Campbell too often applies a soft hand when a stronger, sharper one was called for.

It is not that After Sunday fails entirely. Its heart is in the right place. But what might have been a searing examination of confinement and memory often feels muted. By the curtain, one wants the promise of its premise of healing, of transformation, to translate into a visceral experience. Instead, one is left thinking so much less was done with so much in hand.