A WARTIME SPRINGTIME
It’s not the reptile but the turtledove, as in the Song of Solomon “The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land….Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”. Our hero and heroine, in John van Druten’s intimate 1943 play, are both fond of quoting, not pretentiously but with lonely yearning private feeling. They are all the more likeable for it.
Philip Wilson’s careful, delicate production catches that human yearning, and in this small space his revival expresses it brilliantly. It could hardly be simpler in story (TV would be unable to cope with such workaday credibility). Sally is an earnest, very young actress in New York, a bit mousy at first sight and beautifully contrasted with her older, raunchier friend Olive, who barrels in shrieking about the darling tiny apartment and wanting to know about Sally’s break-up with her married producer. Sally is starting to wonder about these short affairs, and whether they count as being “promiscuous” as well as leaving you sadder than before. Olive has no such moral worries or devotions. She has invited Sgt. Bill, a fling she had in Detroit, to meet her at the flat, but when he turns up she is summoned to dinner by an even hotter fling , just back from the Navy (the men are in khaki: it’s 1943).
So she confects a lie about a husband, and Sally is left with Bill as he finishes his drink. They take to one another, slowly and awkwardly, through his weekend leave. The click of kinship comes, beautifully, when he asks about acting and she, a bit-part ingenue, says how work at her art is a real need. He gets it – quotes Milton’s frustration about “that one talent which is death to hide”. They joke a little about theatre (he is tired of plays where “there’s always a prostitute and a clergyman. That’s what they call a cross section of society” – a nice jibe, in a play about two ordinary young people). They go out to dinner – she a little reluctant as Olive has so firmly snarled “he’s sweet and he’s mine!” But he sleeps on the daybed, and they meet at breakfast, and spend the day: both adrift, having loved and lost. Their slow mutual discovery is all the story (except of course that Olive reappears, disgruntled, and very funny, near the end).
It’s wonderfully done. As Sally, Imogen Elliott is a find: fresh out of Guildhall in a first professional job. She has an ability to display subtle, self-doubting humour, and her deep young qualms about sex, and the risk of loving again, are perfectly pitched. Nathan Ives-Moiba as Bill was new to me (though ten years ago he flitted through Coronation Street as a dumped boyfriend of Todd) and he is also a revelation. Bill is a decent, straightforward, sensitive but soldierly character , and in creating him Ives-Moiba disproves the old saying that “goodness writes white” and simple good characters are hard to play without being dull. Both he and Elliott hold us, anxious for their happiness, all through the play: we live with them at home in Ruari Murchison’s perfectly styled 1940s flatlet (I applaud him for finding a period toaster).
As for Skye Hallam’s gushing, predatory, ultimately furious Olive, she’s a treat in any show. And her return in the last scenes is a perfect, clever van Druten contrast to our sentimental audience anxiety about whether this springtime of young love will flower. Another Jermyn gem.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. to 20 July
Rating four
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