Andrew Bovell’s family drama leaps between period and place as randomly as a rabbit in a paper bag.
It is 30 years in the future and a lonely 50-year-old man in Alice Springs is nervously expecting a visit from the grown-up son he has not seen since he was a child. Now it is London 1988, and a grown-up son is asking his emotionally frosty mother for information about his late father.
Quite what these people have in common, both with each other, with the young London couple in 1959 and the middle-aged Australian man and his increasingly senile wife, is a mystery for much of the uninterrupted two hours of Bovell’s play.
But the answer is worth waiting for. And even though the lesson — that the legacy of events can last beyond the period in which they happened, in this case four generations and 80 years — is not new, it is powerfully told by Michael Attenborough’s elegiac production. So powerfully told, in fact, that you leave the theatre numbed by the journey. What interests this Australian writer is the legacy of family secrets and how they inform the lives of future generations, some of whom are unaware even that a secret existed, or that the pain with which they live is rooted in the actions of an ancestor they never knew.
The search for that secret is what drives 28-year-old Gabriel Law to travel in his dead father’s footsteps from London to Ayers Rock in the hope of better knowing the man his mother refuses to talk about. The discovery of the secret is what leads, half a century later, to the 50-year-old man waiting for the son he hardly knows.
But if the author’s point is that our behaviour today affects the lives of our great grandchildren, he rather overeggs the lesson with his play’s motif —– rain. We are talking about the torrential kind that is caused by the global-warming activities of earlier generations. As the man in Alice Springs waits for his son, Bangladesh, we are told, is drowning.
To depict this apocalyptic future world, designer Miriam Buether has gone for the real wet thing. Sheets of the stuff fall on to the Almeida’s stage.
Yet for all the layers of family history revealed, what is most interesting — for both author and the audience — is the manner of the storytelling. Bovell allows characters who exist in different periods and places to share the stage at the same time. They are never aware of each other’s presence, often because they are the same person. That our past exists in our present is the message, which, in the way that common themes can rise in different places on the theatrical landscape, is what J B Priestley’s Time and the Conways, currently revived at the National Theatre, is all about.
Here, Phoebe Nicholls is heartrendingly superb as the widow who deals with her grief by existing in an emotional stasis. Also very fine is Tom Mison as her son who knows the answer to his and his mother’s malaise lies in reconstructing his father’s journey. Jonathan Cullen is terrifyingly ordinary as the man whose actions have such devastating consequences for everyone who is, and will be, connected to him.
If it sounds like a dark evening, it mostly is. But there a moments of humour, and Bovell constructs his play so ingeniously there is great satisfaction to be had in drawing the links between the figures of his family tree before they are revealed. Although, having learned the truth, expect to leave the theatre a little bit devastated. (Tel: 020 7359 4404)
Almeida Theatre London N1
