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Liz and Frank have spent the past few years achiev­ing the sort of anaem­ic exist­ence that passed for middle-class suc­cess for my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion.  Careers, a house, a child.  Care­fully cur­ated shelves of books and knick-knacks in the liv­ing room.  This liv­ing room is the stage for a reunion din­ner party; two old friends have returned from their phil­an­throp­ic endeav­ours in the third world.

An awk­ward even­ing com­mences between two couples who may have once been close, but whose exper­i­ences now leave them grasp­ing for some­thing in com­mon.  Liz dotes on her daugh­ter, a child Frank nev­er wanted, and tries to con­nect with Car­ol over the child she’d men­tioned in count­less let­ters.  Car­ol is clearly griev­ing, and Mar­tin is drink­ing twice as fast as any­one else.  Frank boor­ishly grins and winces whenev­er his wife says some­thing.

The dynam­ic is deeply uncom­fort­able, but some light is shed on the unspoken issues through asides, where a light­ing cue freezes all act­ors but the one with some­thing to say.  It’s not an ori­gin­al device, and hon­estly became frus­trat­ing, espe­cially as each aside would end with the action rewind­ing back before the line or two that had pre­ceded it.  The con­stant repe­ti­tion was eased by the act­ors lend­ing new and dif­fer­ent emphas­is and mean­ing to each repeated line or moment.  They worked incred­ibly hard, and that allowed the ten­sion to build and build through­out.

Ulti­mately, some­thing has to break, and it’s Liz, viol­ently.  Her real­isa­tion of at least some of what has happened to Car­ol, or rather, the child she’d left behind, is agon­ising to watch­ing.  Rebecca Park­er was extraordin­ary, emo­tion­ally and phys­ic­ally, in this role, and I felt my face and body clench­ing up in sym­pathy with hers.  Fin­gal Pol­lock as Car­ol provided an excel­lent foil, with a dig­nity and strength that was quite beau­ti­ful.  I feel like the hus­bands, ulti­mately, were just dis­ap­point­ing props to their wives’ jour­ney.  In a way, the dis­tance with­in each mar­riage was far great­er than the phys­ic­al miles that had sep­ar­ated the couples for years.

There is no res­ol­u­tion in this play.  It’s about ali­en­a­tion and loss and grasp­ing at fantas­ies; the child that might mend a mar­riage, the dream of being a saviour in the third world, the acquis­i­tion of mater­i­al pos­ses­sions…  real­ity is cold and mean and so are people… even the people you love.  I found a little hope in the moments of kind­ness and gen­er­os­ity between Car­ol and Liz.  But mostly it was a pretty damning per­spect­ive.

Was it worth it?  I think so.