I’d have liked to have heard some 1940s diction in a play partially set in the 1940s. The production proceeds at a pedestrian pace at times: a long scene in a hotel bedroom in which Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley) are trying to get some sleep was almost too successful in its execution, in the sense that it very nearly sent your reviewer into the Land of Nod as well. The long pauses in the dialogue could just about be excused given they were trying to sleep. But they continue even in subsequent scenes, one set in the Sixties and the last one in the Noughties, which seemed unnecessary given that those scenes took place in the daytime. To place the very long pauses in context, if a London Underground train had stood still at a station for that long, an apology would have been made over the Tannoy for the delay.
That two people who were in love before the realities of the Second World War intervened should bother to meet decades later seems, at face value, implausible, especially as Violet – spoiler alert – had moved on after Leonard was drafted. She got married and started a family with ‘Jake’, inverted commas mine, because he is an unseen character to the very end. The actors do well to portray their characters as considerably older in the final third of the show – the movements are subtle rather than exaggerated, even if their costumes are somewhat stereotypical.
The play is, I suppose, quintessentially British, with so much left unsaid. The problem is that the reticence of these characters is so embedded and ingrained that it doesn’t exactly make for riveting theatre – on occasion, I felt like I was in a waiting room at the dentist or the GP surgery. The dialogue lurches from topic to topic, encompassing almost everything from delays and cancellations on the railway to whether McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes are indeed biscuits or cakes (there was, as I discovered at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, a tribunal about that, relating to VAT). Much of what was discussed was quite superfluous, which had the advantage of putting before the audience a fairly realistic dialogue. Violet even goes to the toilet at one point, and her mobile phone goes off at another, which are the sort of interruptions one might reasonably expect in real life. It remains rare to see such breaks in theatre, radio, film, or television dramas.
Other characters, who remain all off-stage, are introduced, such as Violet’s daughter Emily, although the audience doesn’t really get to know them properly – the focus is largely instead on the central characters themselves. This makes the play, and this production of it, come across as navel-gazing – and if Violet can communicate with Emily over the phone, why couldn’t she do so with Leonard?
Moments of humour creep in, especially in the ‘old age’ scene, as both characters separately grapple with modern gadgetry. The production values are quite decent – Pollyanna Elston’s set transforms from scene to scene to give each time period a distinctive look and feel, and Aidan Good’s sound design ensures, albeit with a lack of subtlety, background noises that one might reasonably expect. But there’s something about a much older Leonard and Violet limping and shuffling about in the final scene that serves as a metaphor for a show that would have been more engaging if only it had progressed considerably faster.
Review by Chris Omaweng
In 1942, as the bombs begin to fall, Leonard and Violet find themselves in a hotel in Bath, embarking on their first night together and desperately hoping it won’t be their last. It’s the eve of Leonard’s departure for the Front and everything seems to be falling apart for the young couple, but despite their fears the world keeps turning, time keeps moving on, and over a period of sixty years the invisible bond between two people is stretched to its limit.
Cassie Bradley – Violet
Barney White – Leonard
Nick Payne – Writer
James Haddrell – Director
Pollyanna Elston – Designer
Henry Slater – Lighting Designer
Aidan Good – Sound Designer
Greenwich Theatre in association with Park Theatre presents
ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
Park90, Park Theatre, 26 February to 22 March 2025
