Review: ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, Park Theatre

A young man can’t sleep, nervous. A young woman can’t stay quiet, nervous. Anxiety floods the little room, two kids fumbling towards adulthood the way we all did and now, conveniently, forget. But it’s Spring 1942, and Bath is suddenly targeted by the Luftwaffe and, as noise fills the room and fire fills the sky, the girl and the lad stand at a crossroads. A promise, made in haste, proves to be repented at leisure. 

Nick Payne’s 2011 play premiered just before his smash hit, Constellations, and you can see structural and thematic elements shared between them. Both two-handers, both tracking a relationship over time, both poignant in how hard it is to deal with what life throws at you. But there are key differences too.

Cassie Bradley gets the better hand to play. The bright teenager who promised to wait when her beau went off to war, didn’t. Violet tried to contact him, but couldn’t in the fog of the post-war, met a music teacher and went off to lead a middle class life with 2.2 children and a Ford Mondeo on the drive. You can hardly blame her - 1946 was a time for a girl to marry, as she might not get another chance.

Barney White has a trickier job. It’s difficult to see what an uptight, miserable Leonard offered his sparky girlfriend even before he was paralysed with fear after his call-up. But, suffering PTSD as a result of his capture by Japanese forces (something a clever woman like Violet would surely have picked up) he’s locked in, brimming with anger and, I’m afraid to say, one-dimensional and a bit boring.

After a disastrous meeting in middle age that fuelled Violet’s guilt and Leonard’s resentment, we see them again in old age, but things don’t go well a third time round either. That Violet would agree to the visit is just about plausible - that she could have expected anything different surely was not. There's a whiff of sentimentality here and even some mawkishness in Leonard's physical decline and Violet's relationships with her children - but both key elements of their lives go largely unexplored. Perhaps it's an unfair comparison, but Alan Bennett would have found a lot more.

That goes to the heart of the play’s problem - the second two scenes barely add to what we know of the erstwhile couple. There’s a laugh or two, a rambling anecdote or two, a bust-up or two, but the 90 minutes drags, as neither the man’s nor the woman’s social status and internal psychology go much beyond the markers we’ve already clocked through Pollyanna Elston’s nicely observed costumes. You wonder if director, James Haddrell, could have excised some repetition with a few cuts, but the play is short enough as it is.

Leonard remains charmless, needy and lonely; Violet remains guilty, satisfied and insensitive to his damage. There’s a strong sense that the writer could do much more with his material - and, a year later, he did.   

One Day When We Were Young at Park Theatre until 22 March

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