WHEN WE THAT ARE LEFT GROW OLD….
Sometimes you have to rely on a team with multiple comedy awards to hold a mirror to society and move your heart. This is by Richard Bean (of the NT’s One Man Two Guv’nors and Jack Absolute), co-directed by Terry Johnson and Richard Wilson. So yes, it is very funny – some exchanges like vintage Alan Bennett but without the melancholy – but also merciless. It challenges a generation to contemplate how working-class old age can lie beached when their children’s upward social mobility is all outward and distant, in both geography and values. It’s a beautifully unfashionable theme, personal and necessary.
We’re in a village in East Yorkshire: Jack is 91, long-retired from the Humberside police; Florence his wife of seventy years. Their conversation is like well-dug fertile topsoil: long matured and rotted and often comically irritable. She is losing her sight, he is frail, commuting from stairlift to chair, threatening to go to Dignitas though he’s never been abroad. When you live long, old friends vanish ; live in the 21c, and restlessness and digitization edge you onto the sidelines. The local bank branch has closed, everything’s online and they aren’t, and he can’t drive. Not after a run-in with a hedge on the Scarborough road.
They’re sharp, though, each meeting the other’s maunderings or their offspring’s alienness with dry Yorkshire wit: the kids are on a rare visit because they can only just look after themselves. Pamela in her nurse’s uniform drops in to help with bits of shopping, as does the mountainous, cheerful Rhubarb Eddie. (“What’s the secret?” “Horseshit” “Do you force it?” “I have nothing to do with the horse”). Both are met with nervous contempt by the middle-aged youngsters: Rob a successful detective novelist from Muswell Hill and Hollywood, Tina a private healthcare capitalist. They’re global villagers, “Anywheres” in David Goodhart’s famous definition – and Jack and Florence are rooted: Somewheres. Pam guilt-trips Rob with “You can’t wipe his bum by Skype”, and Tina’s business brain homes in suspiciously on their trustful arrangement of giving Rhubarb Eddie the bank card and PIN to pick up cash every week from Driffield.
The joy of the play is in the humour, the absurdist exasperated familiarity of maunderings about mumps, Jim Reeves, and Sandie Shaw’s bare feet, set against the competent shallowness of the siblings. If this play lives on, and it absolutely should, and soon, I pray that Alun Armstrong is forever Jack. He’s perfect, cantankerous in company but reminiscently melancholy alone with his police memories, which he won’t let his writer son record on his phone for material but has found a way to keep. May Marion Bailey also long be Florence, and Adrian Hood play Rhubarb Eddie for many, many months. Humour and heart – and, late on, one tender moment and a final small moral heroism – are finely balanced. Though judging by interval conversations, there’s much to wince at for a busy midlife generation watching their parents’ last years from far away.
It also features the best possible use of Jim Reeves’ mournfully romantic “Distant drums”. And if a play is partly judged by its ending, it scores. It isn’t often that a battered Sony cassette recorder and a comic anecdote about a Cornish pastie make you find yourself scribbling the closing lines of King Lear. There is a fine generation leaving us, without fuss, and attention should be paid.
Box office. hampsteadtheatre.com to 25 November
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