By Genevieve Dammery

A family photograph can preserve a moment while concealing everything that came before it. In The Smile of Her, Christine Lahti opens with an image of apparent domestic bliss: a 1950s American family smiling for the camera. It is a photograph of a conventional, happy childhood. Yet beneath the smiling faces lies a much more complicated story.

Written and performed by Lahti, The Smile of Her is an intimate autobiographical work exploring childhood, family, feminism, trauma and the experience of being a woman in an industry shaped by sexism. Drawing on Lahti’s own life and experiences, the 90-minute production moves between memories of her upbringing in Michigan, her involvement in the women’s liberation movement, and her career as an actor.

Central to the play is Lahti’s relationship with her mother. Her mother’s smile becomes an important recurring image: initially it represents the expectations placed upon women of her generation to remain accommodating and silent. As Lahti revisits her childhood from the perspective of adulthood, however, her understanding shifts. Instead of representing submission, she realises it is a symbol of endurance and survival; a way of navigating a world in which women were given little opportunity to express anger, dissatisfaction, or ambition.

Throughout the play Lahti addresses difficult subjects including domestic violence, emotional and sexual abuse, and the misogyny she encountered throughout her career. These experiences are presented without an attempt to make them easy to digest, but the production is not relentlessly bleak. Moments of humour provide relief, while also revealing Lahti’s ability to find absurdity within the experiences that were often deeply traumatic.

The production’s cast of two actors allows Lahti to remain at its centre. She plays multiple members of her family, distinguishing them through subtle changes in voice and physicality, while a younger version of Lahti provides another perspective on the memories being recounted. This gives the production a personal quality, with Lahti effectively confronting the person she once was. Rather than presenting her younger self simply as a character from the past, she becomes someone Lahti can question, understand and empathise with.

The staging is simple. A white sofa, protected by plastic, sits at the centre of the stage, while photographs and archival material from her career appear behind Lahti, often providing necessary moments of comic relief throughout the performance. Lahti is compelling throughout. With little between herself and the audience, she carries the production through its many shifts in tone and time. Her performance truly shines when she allows moments of vulnerability and realisation to remain understated.

The Smile of Her’s principal weakness is the amount of material it attempts to cover within 90 minutes. Childhood, family, feminism, sexual violence, acting, Hollywood and ageing are all explored, with some themes receiving less attention than they deserve. At times, the play feels more like a series of memories than a tightly structured dramatic narrative, though this appears deliberate.

Nevertheless, there is value in Lahti’s refusal to present her life as a straightforward story of overcoming adversity. Instead, she explores the more complicated process of living with the past and developing a new understanding of the people who shaped us. The play recognises that our parents can simultaneously be sources of love and harm, and that attempting to understand their flaws does not necessarily excuse them.

Ultimately, The Smile of Her is a deeply personal exploration of memory, womanhood and the complicated legacy of family. What begins as an examination of what is captured in a photograph gradually becomes an examination of everything that the photograph cannot show. Behind the smiles are a series of lives, and Lahti is determined to tell the stories that the photograph left out.