Cush Jumbo

Trauma Release
Review of the Audible Original audiobook edition (September 8, 2022)

I don't know about anyone else, but I have such a positive good will about Cush Jumbo's performance as lawyer Lucca Quinn in the later episodes of the TV series The Good Wife (2009-2016) and then again in the sequel series The Good Fight (2017 - ongoing, although Jumbo exited the series in 2021) that I will watch / listen to anything she performs in afterwards. I didn't even know that she was British until I caught up with some back episodes of the detective series Vera where she was one of the assistant detectives on the murder squad.

So it turns out that Jumbo has quite a long history in British theatre and film and also with Phylidda Lloyd, the director of this recent audioplay. Lloyd has had breakthrough hits with the film adaptations of Mamma Mia (2008) and The Iron Lady (2011) but also has directed experimental stagings such as an all-female Shakespeare series known as the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy, where Jumbo apparently played Marc Anthony in the original staging but not in the final film.

Gilly Gilly is Jumbo's second own work written for theatre, following Josephine and I (2013) which mashed up the lives of iconic actress Josephine Baker with that of a modern day woman. Gilly Gilly is somewhat of a bait-and-switch. It starts out with a daughter struggling to get into her grandmother's apartment followed up with a search through the kitchen for various cooking utensils and ingredients. You think that this is going to be some sort of light-hearted intergenerational dramedy about recipes and family heritage. The recipe however isn't the supposed chicken dish of gilli-gilli or gilly-gilly* as advertised, but instead is for basic scones.

See photograph at https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2f66e62602c5df8ff6a5e17410977523e6d385a5/0_258_39...
Actor/author Cush Jumbo. Image sourced from the Guardian.

It all proceeds rather fussily through the kitchen duties, until the baking process triggers memories of family abuse, not from the daughter's own past, but about her mother and a deviant grandfather protected by the grandmother. This trauma release comes along very late and feels not of a piece with the rest of the work.

See promotional image at https://images.ctfassets.net/9i3f0j4g4w7c/3x5iT9pVRTtZxCwtfgBmY6/fe1ee40d587ba6d...
Promotional image for 6 Audible Theatre releases in the Fall of 2022. Image sourced from Audible.

I listened to Gilly Gilly as part of Audible Theater's release of 6 new audio-plays in the Fall of 2022. I chose Cush Jumbo's work first due to my past positive experiences with her performances. Her performance of Gilly Gilly is certainly committed, but the overall arc of the piece felt off, with its gut-punch ending shocker following its kitchen rambles.

Other Reviews
The opinion in the review from The Guardian, September 26, 2022 is mostly equivalent to mine.

Trivia and Links
* I looked up these recipes for Chicken Adobo Gilly Gilly and Gilli Gilli before I realized that the dish had no apparent relationship to the plot of the audio-play.… (mehr)