On Golden Pond

Published Tuesday 4 April 2006 at 10:30 by Anne Hopper

Norman and Ethel Thayer spend each summer in their cottage on Golden Pond in New England. It’s Norman’s 80th birthday, Ethel is a decade younger and to date the summers have passed uneventfully. But Norman now suffers both physical and mental deterioration and Ethel fears for her future.

The couple’s only child, Chelsea, long estranged from her irascible father, arrives with her boyfriend and his 13 year-old son, Billy, leaving the boy to spend the summer with her parents. She returns to find Norman establishing a rapport with Billy she never had.

At this point Stefan Escreet’s production picks up the pace that was lacking in the early scenes and establishes each character’s search for answers to the problems of growing up, growing old and growing closer together. Jamie Williams makes an assured professional debut as Billy, sharing the role with William Greenwell, and Rosalind Cressy portrays well the bewilderment of an only child whose father could not relate to a daughter. Her friendship with Charlie, now the local mail man, is the one stable memory of a troubled childhood. Rowe David McClelland shows the rejection beneath Charlie’s comic bluster while Patrick Polletti, as Chelsea’s boyfriend, makes the most of the humour in his introductory scene with Norman. Thompson’s stage play is funnier than his much darker screenplay.

But this production’s strength lies in its two leading performances - Morris Perry’s playing of the scene in which Norman doesn’t recognise familiar scenes around the cottage and returns in panic to the comfort of his wife’s reassuring arms will live long in the memory, as will Ellen Sheean’s splendidly ebullient and effervescent Ethel. Played in the round on Martin Johns’ evocative New England setting, the production is worth seeing for these two performances alone.