Peter Viney's Blog

By Bernard Slade

Directed by Michael Cabot
Designer set & costume: Bek Palmer

London Classic Theatre, 2022 Tour
Lighthouse,Poole
Saturday 26 March 2022, 14.30 matinee

CAST:

Kieran Buckeridge – George
Sarah Kempton – Doris

Last minute plays and films are often a greater pleasure. This was recommended on Saturday morning by a friend. We were undecided about going because of masks, but Poole Lighthouse has a high roof and rapid filtration. We decided to go at 1.25, bought our tickets online at 1.30, left the house at 1.50. Parked at five past two. Out at 4.30. Back home at 4.45. Sometimes local is good.

We thought it looked nearly full online, until I realise the grey seats were the occupied ones, and the red, yellow and blue on the seating plan were the empty ones. The programme seller told me there were only forty-seven of us in. Social distancing wasn’t going to be a problem in a theatre with 669 seats.

I was wholly ignorant of the play. I was also wholly ignorant that it was on … just for two days, three performances. Poole is a constant pain for touring companies as they keep booking things on single days, meaning companies can’t get a decent economic run. They’re also poor at publicity. I get constant adverts from Chichester, RSC, NT, Globe, Old Vic, Southampton MAST, Bath Theatre Royal, Winchester, Salisbury Playhouse, but very little from Poole just along the road. I am on their mailing list and they have my e-mail. They have lots of expensive colour fliers in the lobby and seem to assume people will come and find them. That might work if the theatre weren’t separated from the shopping centre and main car park by a dual carriageway. Anyway, we picked up a stack of colour card fliers in the lobby for stuff we didn’t know was coming.

To the play …

Bernard Slades was a Canadian writer, living in the USA, and one of the original Partridge Family writers. Same Time, Same Place was a Tony-nominated Broadway hit in 1975, running for 1453 performances. It was later a film. I have a blind spot on 70s and 80s Broadway plays, and as they’re revived I repeat the same curmudgeonly comment. The genre is inevitably one elaborate realistic set, no set changes, more talk than action, very small casts, based on two famous / star actors in the lead parts, sometimes with a couple of lesser mortals alongside. Not here, this is a two-actor play and exactly fits the template. You don’t get a Ruling Class or a Zigger-Zagger with large casts and multiple scenes. In the USA, that sort of large cast effort is directed at musicals, the theatrical form which America has always excelled at.

To the positive, it’s a very well-crafted and constructed play, with some memorable lines, and a few really ‘killer’ scene enders and starters.The entrance in Act one, scene 3, the first line of Act 2 and the last line of Act 2 Scene 2 are outstanding. No plot spoilers. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

A couple, George and Doris have spent one night of wild illicit passion in a hotel room after meeting casually in the hotel restaurant. Both are happily married with children. They agree to meet up once every year on the same day at the same place and repeat the event. Each scene is marked as an anniversary. They discuss their spouses and children each time … Helen for George, Harry for Doris.

Keiran Buckeridge as George and Sarah Kempton as Doris give wonderful performances, pinpointing the comedy perfectly. They have chemistry, which is vital for the parts. The play is very funny, yet can also tug on other emotions – again no plot spoilers. I felt sorry for them, given the size of the Saturday matinee audience and both of us had sore hands from clapping so hard to give them some sort of feedback.

There are six approximately equal scenes.In this production, each scene is introduced with music to set the year. I don’t know whether these are set in the original text.
Act One
Scene 1: 1951 (Mona Lisa)
Scene 2: 1956 – 5th Anniversary (Memories Are Made of This)
Scene 3: 1961- 10th Anniversary (Poetry in Motion)

Interval intro: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Act Two
Scene 1: 1965 – 14th Anniversary (Tired of Waiting)
Scene 2: 1970 – 19th Anniversary (Sugar Sugar)
Scene3: 1975 – 24th Anniversary (the date it was performed, the song only vaguely familiar)

The set is a good choice by designer Bek Palmer, who also did the strong costume choices.

It’s a Northern California bungalow hotel room in Spanish-American style. I looked online at photos of past productions, and it’s not always like that. The style is so strong that it is feasible that the room changes little over twenty-five years. You can see the style in films from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. I’ve stayed in hotels in the same style in California and Arizona in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. They’re building contemporary new houses in the same style nowadays. We remembered another play which takes place over several years in one location where they marked the passing of time with a variety of phones. It’s perfectly feasible that as the hotel updated phones they stuck with the same retro style though … phone calls are important in the plot. Also this is touring on a budget, and even tiny set changes might require an additional ASM.

The costumes, particularly Doris’s, are strong changing images of the time period of each scene. She has six different wigs. Not only are the actors on all the time, but she must have had to work non-stop between scenes changing costumes and wigs. This is Doris in 1956:

Then 1961 might be the best scene in the play, with Doris’s surprise entrance. One of the things that works so well in the story is the deal that they just turn up once a year. They don’t communicate in between, and just trust that the other will show. So every time a year has passed with no communication, meaning major stuff has happened in their lives.

But 1965? That’s a problem. San Francisco may have been ahead of the rest of the world, but Doris’s costume and attitude is channelling 1966 to 1967. The introductory tune, Tired of Waiting by The Kinks is January 1965, even if it sums up waiting in a hotel room.

Her clothes, her lines about Berkeley and political attitude are 18 months to two years later. The intro song might have been For What It’s Worth, Eight Miles High or White Rabbit, connected to revolutionary hippy, but not an early 1965 English mod hit. When I started university in 1966, you never saw that dress style. In Autumn 1967 large numbers of the new arrivals were wearing it.

Why not just change the numbers and call it 1966 or 1967? (Then 1971 and 1976 would work just as well as 1970 and 1975). The reaction against the Vietnam war, which is crucial, was more obvious in 1967. That would cause a couple of problems … Doris is right-on hippy now, while George admits he voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, a man so far to the right that we had to wait until Trump to match him. For it to be such an issue for them, 1965 fits better. Then again for a 2022 audience, Goldwater is an election loser confined to the dustbin of history. Who remembers him?

I liked 1970, where they start to reverse roles – George has got into psycho-analysis, and she’s starting a successful business.

I’m glad I’ve seen the play. It is full of genuine surprises, and comments on marriage, parenthood, sex, love, politics, religion, psychology. Mostly it’s about how people change over the years. I’ve mentioned some excellent scene starters and enders. Only one puzzled me (please do enlighten me if you know). In the very last scene, he suggests they marry, but she can’t leave Harry her husband. So they decide to finish it, only for George to come back a few minutes later. He had a final punch line, all either of us heard was ‘Eighty-nine!’ then they embrace. The end. We spent the (short) drive home trying to guess what it was. Was it ‘Let’s decide in 1989’? ‘Let’s keep on till we’re 89?’ Was it Harry’s eighty-nine, so won’t last long? That’s a bit risky … a friend’s dad married a woman forty-five years younger when he was eighty. All believed she was after his money. He lived to his late nineties! Anyway that would place Harry as 45 years older than Doris. It doesn’t work with references to him having served in World War II. (SEE COMMENT BELOW FOR SOLUTION)

Anyway, tell me if you know. I’ll add it here. Also a suggestion to Mr Buckeridge to pause and point that line more clearly.

There was a line in the 1956 scene that surprised me by not getting a reaction. One of them expresses the fear that Russia might bomb us all. A larger and younger audience would have reacted,I think.

We discussed the audience … a lot of coughing and fairly elderly as befits a matinee. The play is 48 years old, so I guess for many of us it would be like the audiences we noted twenty or thirty years ago, who were elderly people turning out for Coward and Rattigan to recall the 1930s and 1940s For us, it is to recall the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe the play has the mileage in it to survive as long as Coward and Rattigan have.