Honeymoon Suite

Published Monday 3 March 2008 at 15:10 by Kevin Berry

Richard Bean’s 2004 play has a potentially fascinating structure. Set in the honeymoon suite of a Bridlington hotel it has three pairs of actors playing Hull couple Eddie and Irene Witchell at key stages in their married life. Often all six actors are on stage at the same time.

Does Bean do magical things with this structure? Does he ask our imaginations to take flight? He does not. He settles for a routine comedy drama, very funny in places but still rather routine.

The middle-aged Witchells, celebrating their silver anniversary, conclude a fraught confrontation. They freeze and audience attention focuses on the honeymooning Witchells. The couples are not aware of each other and, for fleeting magical, poignant moments, they could be. If the play did take some imaginative leaps then its many puzzling narrative strands would not matter.

Witchell in eccentric, shambolic old age is played with fine comic bluntness by Roy North. His honeymooning self is Marc Pickering, a young actor who invests his character with believable cheek and ambition.

Meriel Scholfield has the key female role as the middle-aged Mrs M, a woman who is about to turn her life around, and she gives Honeymoon Suite its emotional drive.

The other parts do not offer too much scope for the remaining actors. Honeymoon Suite will have its audiences laughing but there is a strong sense of this play having stopped well short of what it might have been.