Resolution & the Ending
Scene 8: The Final Confrontation
Leave Taking's final scene takes place at Mai's Deptford bedsit — the same space in which the play opened. The return to this setting is structurally deliberate: the Caribbean spiritual world, which Enid tried to exclude from her family's life, has not been left behind. It is the space in which the family's most important reckoning takes place. The confrontation in Scene 8 is raw, painful and deeply human: Enid must face what she has suppressed, and Del must choose whether to allow Enid back into her life. Viv does not appear: we learn from Enid that she is leaving for university.
Pinnock stages this confrontation not as melodrama but as messy, overlapping domestic reality: raised voices, tears, silences, accusations that carry weight because they contain truth. Enid is forced to confront the cost of her strategy of suppression — she cannot control Del's choices, she cannot prevent grief or loss, and she cannot maintain the silence that has defined her relationship with her own history.
Pinnock's naturalistic dialogue in Scene 8 — characters interrupting each other, retreating, returning — reflects how real families argue about real pain. The authenticity deepens the emotional impact: the audience feels they are witnessing something genuine rather than scripted. This is a deliberate dramatic choice — the absence of melodrama makes the reconciliation feel hard-won rather than inevitable.
Del Reads Enid's Palm
The play's most powerful moment comes when Del reads Enid's palm. This is the play's emotional climax and its central symbolic act. Mai has given Del her notebook — the accumulated knowledge of an Obeah woman — because she has no daughter of her own to pass it to, and she manoeuvres Del into taking Enid as a client. Del performing the palm reading she once refused (in Scene 1 she declined to have her own palm read) signals her transformation: she has accepted her gift and Mai's inheritance.
The palm reading is also a gesture of reconciliation towards Enid. Del is not simply performing a spiritual act — she is offering her mother something: acknowledgement, connection, a bridge across the distance that Enid's assimilation strategy created. Enid, who dismissed Mai's Obeah as backward, allows her daughter to read her palm. This is Enid's own act of acceptance — small, tentative, but real.
Pinnock places two candles on stage in Scene 8. A half-burnt white candle sits near Mai — her role coming to an end. A fully-lit candle sits in front of Del — her life and role beginning. This stagecraft encapsulates the play's central movement: a spiritual inheritance passing from one generation to the next. Mai is not simply fading — she is completing a task. Del is not simply surviving her chaotic adolescence — she is beginning something.
Fragile Reconciliation and the Title's Meanings
The title 'Leave Taking' comes full circle in Scene 8. It carries at least three meanings. First, Enid's original leave-taking: her departure from Jamaica that created the displacement the family has been living with. Second, the daughters' leave-taking: Del leaving Enid's home to live at Mai's; Viv departing for university and a future Enid did not plan for her. Third — and most importantly — the leave-taking from shame: letting go of the secrecy and self-denial that defined Enid's relationship with her heritage.
Pinnock's most radical message is that cultural identity can be reclaimed even after years of suppression. The ending suggests that it is never too late to reconnect with one's roots — not by going back to Jamaica, but by acknowledging Jamaica's presence in who you are.
Leave Taking's ending offers fragile reconciliation rather than a neat happy ending. Pinnock does not pretend that one conversation can undo decades of suppression. Enid's grief about her mother's death cannot be erased. The racism that drove her assimilation has not disappeared. Del has not returned home — she stays at Mai's bedsit with her pregnancy and her new role. But there is movement: a willingness to be honest, to accept what was previously denied.
The 2018 Bush Theatre revival of Leave Taking demonstrates the play's continued relevance. Thirty years after it was written, the questions it asks — Where do I belong? What did my parents sacrifice? How do I hold two cultures at once? — remain urgently alive for Caribbean-British families and for immigrant communities more broadly.