This revival of Nick Payne’s intimate two-hander packs a lot into ninety minutes: six decades in fact, beginning in 1942 when young lovers Leonard and Violet give their families invented explanations for not coming home and book into a Bath hotel for a night together, their first and their last before Leonard goes off to fight.
So far, it hasn’t been easy and blissful. Leonard wakes from a nightmare: he was sinking in a quagmire and thought he saw Father Christmas approaching, a Santa who turned into a Japanese soldier. A foretaste of the future? Most certainly, just as Violet’s passionate promise of commitment—that she loves him forever and will wait for his return when the war is over—may suggest where the plot will be going, but Nick Payne’s script is mainly more subtle.
After their initial love-making is violently interrupted by the Bath blitz, the action moves on two decades to the sixties, when they next encounter each other. Though Violet is now married with teenage children, the spark of attraction is still there; how should they deal with it.? Fast-forward again, and it’s around the Millennium for the third meeting that we witness: a widowed Violet visiting an ailing Leonard at his request.
Romantic dreams come face to face with reality, all made touchingly moving by the sincere performances of Cassie Bradley as Violet and Barney White as Leonard. Payne’s dialogue is full of embarrassments and banalities, but so much is going on between the words, and director James Haddrell has given his actors full rein to imbue silence with meaning.
Pollyanna Elston’s design puts the audience on two sides, emphasising the intimacy of the staging, but her solutions for playing three locations in the same space are a little unwieldy. As the bombs begin to rain down on Bath as Hitler starts his Baedecker, what looks like Leonard trying to block out the blast segues into the actors dismantling the furniture, but it also matches the dismembering of their lives and presages the symbolism of the third scene where disruptions to the power supply could represent blips in Leonards brain as they lead up to a major power cut, when, instead of producing candles, he gets sparklers from the kitchen, a momentary recapturing of romance before their light goes out too.
The actors take going from golden youth to old age in their stride (quite literally by slower mobility) without make-up; it is broadly signalled, they concentrate on feelings and they make the audience share them.
Reviewer: Howard Loxton