Music, says Hattie, is meant to be a comfort. However within the opening moments of this play, it feels extra like an exorcism, as she sits down at a piano in St Pancras Worldwide station and offers a efficiency that goes immediately viral.
In Samuel Adamson’s newest work, two pals reconnect late in life, and what follows is a journey from side to side by way of their timeline, exploring the love of music that introduced them collectively and the occasions which have pushed them aside.
Jon Bausor’s set revolves (generally actually) round an ever-present piano, the instrument on the centre of Hattie and James’s encounters. After we first see them collectively they’re 16-year-olds, compelled upon one another by a college manufacturing of Noye’s Fludde. Sophie Thompson and Charles Edwards give pleasant performances that highlights their unlikely pairing: James, his chin jutting in awkward, involuntary spasms, is a self-declared “spod”, Hattie a livewire who hides her vodka beneath the piano lid and declares herself “hooked on Fanny”.
She means Mendelssohn, the ignored composer-sister of the well-known Felix, and the story that unspools throughout seven many years is flavoured with the melancholy of misplaced expertise in addition to betrayal and damaged relationships. On stage, pianist Berrak Dyer offers the music that underscores the protagonists’ conferences with sentiment and drama, and Suzette Llewellyn portrays the opposite ladies of their lives – from Hattie’s fearsome gatekeeper spouse, Bo, to their respective moms – one an upstanding member of the group, the opposite a daytime drinker.
The performances elicited by director Richard Twymanare witty and professional. Thompson works her full vary as Hattie, segueing expertly from girlish to grotesque to quietly dignified. But James, struggling together with his sexuality and his envy alike, appears the extra nuanced, developed character, even in a script that calls out the “tender hum” of misogyny and celebrates the lives of invisible ladies.
Whether or not the particular bond between the pair fairly lives as much as its billing is unsure – however the revelation of the moments which have made them, in addition to the missed connections that outline them, are a robust reminder of what we owe to one another.
