Not Your Superwoman: A Tender Reckoning With Legacy, Love, and Lineage

In the aftermath of a matriarch’s death, two women—Joyce and her daughter Erica—are left to sift through the wreckage of what came before. But what do you do when the centre that held your family together disappears? And what if you were never meant to be the one to step into her place? These are the aching questions that pulse through the play, posed not as intellectual riddles but as emotional truths, embedded in the silences, the interruptions, the memories half-spoken and never quite resolved.

This is not a tale of trauma writ large, but of the quieter, more insidious legacies that women carry. Dennis-Edwards gives us a narrative that dares to linger in the in-between spaces—the ones where resilience becomes exhaustion, and where love, so often unspoken, can look like distance. As Erica searches for meaning in the wake of her mother’s passing, she begins to wonder if all the work—therapy, self-reflection, refusal—has truly set her free, or if she too is trapped in the very cycle she once swore she’d break.

The play is sharp in its specificity yet universally resonant, especially in its deep understanding of Caribbean family dynamics. There's a tension here between silence and survival, between tradition and transformation. Dennis-Edwards does not flatten these women into symbols of strength. Instead, she lets them be complicated—flawed, loving, brittle, and trying their best in a world that rarely gives Black women permission to be anything less than unbreakable.

On stage, this two-hander blooms with life in every gesture and pause. The small-scale setting is not a limitation—it’s the play’s secret weapon. The Bush Theatre’s intimacy forces you to lean in, to listen closely, to sit with every unfinished sentence and unspoken truth. The emotional charge lives in the details: a flicker of doubt in a glance, the way a line hovers in the air before it’s answered. In this space, subtlety becomes symphonic.

There’s also a sense that this work has been shaped not just by writing, but by living. Dennis-Edwards’s own experience as both writer and performer in past work—particularly the acclaimed Funeral Flowers—can be felt in the way the dialogue breathes, in how naturally it inhabits the body and voice. This is writing that understands performance from the inside out. It has rhythm, weight, and instinct, forged through an awareness of what lands on stage and what lingers in the mind long after.

More than that, Not Your Superwoman feels like a continuation of a larger conversation—one about how stories from the global majority are told, and who gets to tell them. In Dennis-Edwards’s hands, this story refuses to be sanitized, romanticised, or neatly concluded. It is told with authenticity and authority, refusing the kind of narrative that reduces complexity into palatability. The play doesn't ask for understanding. It commands presence.

And this is where its power lies. In a landscape where stories from marginalised communities are too often filtered, simplified, or sidelined, Not Your Superwoman makes no such compromises. It is a testament to what can happen when writers from these communities are not just included but centred—trusted with the full weight of their truth, complexity, and creativity.

This is not a play that aims to comfort. It challenges. It exposes. And yet, in its rawness, it extends something even more generous than resolution: it offers recognition. For anyone who has ever questioned whether breaking free is possible, or feared they’ve inherited more than they intended, this story offers a mirror.

At the Bush Theatre until 1 November, Not Your Superwoman is a quiet revolution—one that refuses the cape, and instead offers something braver: honesty.