May and June: Part One

May Thrace and June Symonds are sisters, and the gap between them is the subject of the whole story. June lives in the lap of luxury. Recently widowed, she has an elegant home and time on her hands. May struggles and has always struggled. She has spent a lifetime being the mousy one. The rivalry between them has years of history behind it, and neither woman has forgotten a single round. It is the kind of imbalance that breeds resentment quietly over decades, until it hardens into something else.

Then June invites May to come and live with her. May accepts, and the episode follows the two women sharing one roof with all the old feelings rising to the surface. Underneath the polite domesticity, May becomes convinced that she has been done a great injustice, and the conviction settles into her like something solid. The house is beautiful, and that is precisely the problem: every room reminds May what she does not have. The story unfolds across the course of a single day, with flashbacks that show May and June as children, so the weight of the past stays in the room with them.

Ken Blakeson wrote it, James Cellan Jones directed. Phoebe Nicholls plays May and Christine Kavanagh plays June. Albert Welling and Gabrielle Reidy are Mr. and Mrs. Thrace. The younger versions are well cast: Charlotte Mason-Apps as May aged three, Jessica Fox as May at thirteen, and Claire Szekeres as June aged ten. Tina Hobley appears as a woman on a train, Lloyd McGuire as a man on the same rails, and Michael Nardone plays a mortuary attendant. It aired on 7 February 1997.

The episode stays intensely personal, using one elegant house as the stage for a family wound that has never healed. Part one is the setup: two sisters under one roof, with a conviction forming that neither of them will be able to control.