The course of a lifetime friendship is traced in David Kerby-Kendall’s new play, which neither breaks new ground nor offers any special insights, but covers familiar and somewhat predictable ground with a pleasant blend of humour and sentiment.
The two characters are met first as seven-year-olds, then as adolescents, and then in their twenties, forties, sixties and eighties. Their personalities and the shape of their friendship remains pretty unvarying throughout - one is defined as plodding and conservative and the other as more free-wheeling, though the evidence to support this consists mainly of the ratio of one failed marriage to five.
The one constant and, we are gradually led to appreciate, the strongest emotional bond in their lives is their friendship, so by the time they reach the last scenes they sound and act like an old married couple.
As directed by Joe Fredericks, neither the playwright as the plodding character nor Lucas Hare as the more life-embracing one does much to indicate changes in age through voice or body language, instead relying on textual information and evocative between-scenes newsreel film clips to tell us where we are in the chronology.
The writing and acting do capture the feel of some of the life stages, particularly the young boys’ mix of frivolity and intense seriousness and the old men’s mutual devotion, though the playwright’s conception of the personalities as essentially unchanging means that the 14, 21 and 44-year-olds tend to sound and think much the same.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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