Writer Nick Payne excels at capturing the shape and hue of a romance across time. One couple stutters through the non-linear span of their relationship in his play Constellations, while another travels back and forth across a decade in his screenplay for We Live in Time, starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.
Here is another love story, originally staged in 2011. We initially meet Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley) in 1942, in a hotel room in Bath, with the intimacy of bare skin and bedclothes. A shyly ardent romance is commencing but stalled by war: this is the apprehensive night before Leonard leaves for the frontline. The pair plan to marry and have a life together afterwards, however long it takes.
Backstories leak in through the flow of dialogue – he is a London butcher while her family run a shop. The class difference, caught in this information and their accents, becomes clearer when we meet them next, after the war. Their circumstances have changed, disappointment has set in, and they are reduced to small talk.
The relationship is presented in three distinct parts, and time zones, from the night at the hotel through to 2002. As in several of Payne’s works, death is in the offing, too, but the play is not as structurally complex as his non-linear stories, treading chronologically through time to show its impact on this pair.
The script does not contain the same emotional profundity either, but what lifts it are two beautiful central performances. Bradley and White bring sweetness and vulnerability to the wartime hotel room, brittleness to the couple’s next meeting and finally tenderness to the challenging ending in which they are elderly.
In a production directed by James Haddrell, time resets with the help of music from the respective eras. Bradley and White move Pollyanna Elston’s set around themselves, switching scenes from the hotel room to a bench and then Leonard’s bachelor flat.
There are some intense moments, particularly in Leonard’s sense of betrayal, and levity too, with mentions of farts, Jaffa Cakes and Durex. It creaks to its close, and you wish for the fast-forwards of Constellations to whiz you through a more coloured-in story, but is worth seeing for two incredibly sensitive performances.
At Park theatre, London, until 22 March
