Theatre - Michael Portillo is not entirely satisfied by a play about love, sex and growing old

Life is a tartine de merde, wrote Michele Blouin, a piece of which you must eat every day. In his new play, Honeymoon Suite, Richard Bean shows how a married couple copes with that diet. We visit them in the same hotel suite three times: on their wedding night, when they return for their 25th anniversary, and when they meet there again in their late sixties. As 18-year-olds, Eddie and Irene are much in love, but even on their night of bliss they find it hard to feel lust simultaneously. She is too worried about what the suite has cost her trawlerman father, an anxiety that turns out to be well placed. In any case, there are clouds gathering: he is more ambitious than honest, and she is much cleverer than he.

By their sixties, he has got through life more by crook than by hook, abandoning fish-gutting for insurance fraud, shop-lifting and worse. John Alderton gives a wonderful portrayal of the older Eddie. He holds us for minutes on end, first wordlessly padding around the bedroom, and then in a telephone monologue. Eddie's become an oddball, sporting hippie-style lank grey hair, flirting with eastern religions, a figure filled with self-pity. The contrast with Liam Garrigan's slim and self-confident wide boy, the bridegroom of the early 1950s, is beautifully made. Correspondingly, the unbearably naive and prissy bride, played by Sara Beharrell, has acquired worldly wisdom by the time the role passes to Marjorie Yates, who magnificently reveals a woman hardened equally by personal disappointment and career success.

In the middle are Jeremy Swift and Caroline O'Neill, playing Eddie and Irene as a couple who have achieved their material ambitions but nothing else. They no longer get a kick from champagne. Guilt, recrimination and bereavement are etched on her face. For him life is simpler: "You love someone, you can feel it, like a lump, summat you carry around with yer. Bloody hell, it's either there or it int, like a hat." He chooses their silver wedding to re-declare his love, she to tell him she's having an affair. But save your pity, because he's using their weekend back at the Bridlington hotel to supply an alibi for a crime.

Bean's interest in Hull trawlers provided the theme of his successful Under the Whaleback, which also examined the ravaging effects on a family of passing time. In Honeymoon Suite, the three episodes from the lives of the same couple are presented on stage simultaneously, a device that works well. The actors from one decade simply ignore those from the past or the future, even when their counterparts are humping energetically under the sheets. The script sets up mysteries about the world-weary sexagenarians that are resolved later in the play by remarks made by the honeymooners 49 years before.

This is clever stuff, but it demands the pace and slickness of a Whitehall farce. On the night I went, those qualities were lacking. The director, Paul Miller, needs to close up the gaps by a millisecond or two, and the script needs an occasional tuck.

Bean's rendition of blunt Yorkshire speaking is very funny. The script is borne along by a rough tide of hilarious obscenities. The dialogue also makes us cringe with embarrassment for a young man desperate to adopt a catchphrase that will make him a character with the lads, for a bride who cannot make love before it's dark, for a lonely old guy who rings those free phone numbers that invite you to comment on the quality of lorry drivers' driving.

It rings true enough, too. The past 49 years have expanded horizons for women more than for trawlermen. Irene uses her disillusionment as a springboard, devoting the second half of her existence to getting an education and a life. She acquires responsibility and recognition. Eddie describes all his ambitions as being for other people - he steals, he says, to give Irene what she wants - but he can't see how selfish that makes him.

And yet, I left the theatre unsatisfied. I found the ending implausible. We know, and many have written, about the tragedy of time passing. People, as they eat Michele Blouin's pie, get fatter, and it leaves a bitter taste. They wrinkle up their noses at each other, and at what they themselves once were. At the time when looking in the mirror has become painful, they are obliged to confront what they have become. "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this."

But now I sound as though I am saying that this playwright is no Shakespeare. It would be much fairer to say, echoing Homer Simpson's remark after meeting Tony Blair, that it's a pleasure to encounter Mr Bean.

Honeymoon Suite is at the Jerwood Theatre, Royal Court, London SW1 (020 7565 5000) until 7 February

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website