From the moment you walk into the Studio it’s clear that Sheffield Theatres’ collaboration with new writing champions Paines Plough isn’t business as usual. Like a travelling circus, the company has conjured up an impressive wooden structure in the centre of the auditorium. A plywood amphitheatre set steeply with three tiers of seats. A roundabout if you will. Scream if you want to go faster.
It’s not just the shape of the set that gives the Roundabout Season its name, it’s the repertory style in which the plays are presented. Three world premieres performed by different combinations of four actors over the next eight weeks.
The first of these offerings is Nick Payne’s One Day When We Were Young, the tale of Leonard and Violet who we first meet swearing vows of love and loyalty on their last night together before Leonard is conscripted for service in the Second World War. Next we’re transported to 1963, their awkward rendezvous betraying the fact these vows have not been kept, and then finally in 2002, as pensioners looking back on lives lived apart from one another.
The production gets over the problem of having a two-hander in which the actors are required to age decades inbetween each scene by bringing the costume changes on stage. We watch Maria Alexander and Andrew Sheridan perform an intricate ballet of cut-throat shaving, eyelash gluing and hair whitening accompanied by music redolent of the era we’re about to enter into. It’s a reasonably diverting if a little curious post-modern quirk in what is otherwise a doggedly traditional play.
A season which is billed as ‘new writing’ can surely do better than to start with a scene woven from a thousand clichés. The lovers’ nervous first night together complete with the chap’s inability to remove female undergarments with finesse. The young tommy’s foreboding at going to war and his sweetheart’s fervent promise to wait for him. The sudden bombing raid, as the intimacy of a private moment is shattered by the violence of world events. These tropes are so ubiquitous that it’s to the actors’ credit they managed to invest them with a credulity which was genuinely touching.
Despite the deja-vu of the storyline Payne has a good ear for dialogue. Between Leonard’s laddish humour and simple dreams and Violet’s sharp wit and gentility we find a mismatched pair who may never have stayed together even if a Japanese internment camp hadn’t come between them. Their 1963 meeting only emphasises this distance; Violet has a husband, two children and – in the ultimate marker of middle class smugness – a washing machine, while Leonard lives alone in his dead mother’s house. It’s only in their final meeting in 2002 that age seems to close this gap and they find companionship and an acceptance of their different paths. There’s a tender humour in Violet’s admission that she had a gin on her way to visit Leonard to ‘steady her nerves’ and in Leonard’s boorish explanation of the VAT registration of jaffa cakes. In a poignant final image they watch two sparklers fizzle out in the dark, in an echo of the cigarettes they smoked in the black-out of the first scene.
There’s much to like here and yet you leave with a hope that the rest of the Roundabout Season will give these young actors juicer writing to get their teeth into.
One Day When We Were Young runs until 26 November along with the rest of the season Lungs and The Sound of Heavy Rain