One Day When We Were Young, Park Theatre review - mini-marvel with a poignant punch

Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is much simpler in structure but poses equally potent questions about the nature of love and how it’s moulded by the passage of time.

In Park Theatre’s pocket Park90 space, the teeny stage area is just about able to accommodate a double bed; behind it is a curtained window. A radio broadcast tells us we are in the midst of the Second World War and the Japanese are taking over southeast Asia. In the bed are Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley). As the slowly unfolding dialogue reveals, this is the young couple’s last night before conscripted Leonard has to leave. 

They are in a hotel in Bath, her home town, where her family have a grocer’s. Violet is outgoing  and chatty, Leonard awkward and uncertain. She eventually coaxes him back to bed, where they finally manage to have sex. But the increasingly intrusive sounds from outside, of shooting and explosions, are ominous. Suddenly we hear a plane overhead and a bright light blinds the audience; the window cracks and Leonard’s practicality tells him they need to find an air-raid shelter whereas Violet wants to stay put to “see what happens”, a phrase we will hear again. 

In this first scene, the couple’s personalities are sketched in with the lightest of touches. Leonard is restless and anxious, Violet solicitous and reassuring. He is afraid, not just of leaving for the army, but of losing Violet to somebody else while he is away. She swears she will wait for him for as long as it takes. He has been reading the diary of a neighbour’s dead soldier husband, detailing the inhuman gruesomeness of the war. Already, he is having dreams about Father Christmas being Japanese. He longs to run away with her that night to somewhere “untouched by war”, but she makes it clear she won’t leave her home for him and also refuses his marriage proposal. To lighten the atmosphere, she produces the cake she has made him, with scarce ingredients donated by the rest of her street. He chews a chunk of it manfully.

In all three scenes, Payne finds a natural humour in the couple’s odd dynamic, as well as the dead ends their conversations arrive at, often too coy or naive to spell out what’s happening to them. In the first scene Violet manages to suggest Leonard’s inability to relax is down to the shoes he’s wearing. Her anxiety, on the other hand, is making her “pass wind”, she confesses. He has not told his parents the truth of where he is going to spend the night; she has. Against his reserve, her candour and curiosity about life are clear.

The gap between their sensibilities widens as the play moves on two decades. Director James Haddrell uses the sparest of means for the transitions in time, the two actors moving the double-sided walls and modular furniture to create new sets: next up, the interior of a suburban home, with pictures on the walls. To move us into this second scene, we hear snatches of 1950s rock’n’roll and the Beatles’ “Please Please Me”, while Violet throws confetti over Leonard, who is doing a crossword while waiting for her. Or is it snow? The symbol works both ways: Violet is married, and Leonard is out in the cold. He has bumped into her and her husband while they were shopping for a washing machine. Their small talk is so small as to be painfully comic. 

Beneath it is the sadness of Leonard’s life now, his mother’s recent death, compared to the richness of Violet’s, a time of wonder and innovation, even if that’s symbolised for her by going to London and encountering her first Wimpy Bar, eating ravioli and French sausages and drinking espresso. Her husband, a pilot injured in the war, is a music teacher; now Leonard’s dream of a home with kids and a piano is happening for her somewhere else, while he has only The Archers for company.

The play moves on in the final third to Leonard’s home, some 35 years later, with Blur and Oasis on the soundtrack, the accoutrements of consumer society all around, from his plasma TV and George Foreman grill to his electronic keyboard — a sad echo of the grand piano he dreamed of — but youthfulness is in short supply. A chance occurrence has brought the couple back in touch with each other. But their small talk is even smaller now, and the old ease between them has almost entirely vanished. What is left for them? 

The miracle of Payne’s play is that it answers that question without a shred of sentimentality. The two actors lead us through these two mismatched lives in touching, delicate performances, subtly adjusting their body language to their new ages, White transforming into a 70-something old man in a cardie with stiff limbs and a habit of rubbing his ear and nose, Bradley into a slowly shuffling woman wearing glasses on a chain. As the lights at Leonard’s house flicker and go out, there’s a temptation to see the lack of current as a corollary of the couple’s failed connection; and in one sense, this would be true. But, poignantly, it’s not the whole story. 

• One Day When We Were Young at Park Theatre until 22 March
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