You might guess what kind of night you’re in for by To Have and to Hold’s fabulous opening: the first painstaking entrance in Richard Bean’s play is made on a Stannah stairlift. Yes, we’re in the territory of geriatric comedy, all lived-in bickering and endless offers of tea. This is Jack and Florence Kirk’s house in Wetwang, Humberside, where the nonagenarians are being visited by their grownup children Rob and Tina. Bean’s latest is about whether and how we value old people, and how they can be cut loose when the younger generation gets educated, migrates and climbs the class ladder.
Not cut very loose, mind you. The Kirks’ generational fractures are hairline at worst: they come across as a fond family, and for much of the first half, you’re waiting for a drama that stubbornly – or teasingly – refuses to materialise. From the writer of One Man, Two Guvnors, tonight’s offering is a case of One Play, Two Directors, with Richard Wilson and Terry Johnson sharing credit for a production that savours the claustrophobic comedy of elderly stasis, in lieu of narrative momentum.
The double act at its heart rises to the challenge: the lifetime of co-dependency is palpable in the barbs exchanged by Marion Bailey’s Flo and Alun Armstrong’s frail Jack, and in their exasperated memory-loss dialogues – like the one where Flo struggles to remember the name of a famous film director, the timing of which is almost vaudevillian.
There are dropped stitches as the play progresses. The younger Kirks’ antagonistic relationship with their cousin Pamela feels unresolved. Covid makes a sudden and unannounced appearance. Jack’s stories of his days in the police are beautifully told by Armstrong, but feel tangential for a while – until their prominence recasts To Have and to Hold as a meditation on stories themselves, on the tension between recording them for posterity and being present to hear them in the first place.
It’s a play that touches on ideas around ageing and alienation, care and family love, but focuses on making us laugh – and latterly, nudging a tear towards our eye – rather than developing them.
• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 25 November
