The Roundabout Season, Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall plays host to a touring wooden auditorium with three playwrights and just four actors
p92 Maia Alexander and Andrew Sheridan in One Day When We Were Young
ElyseMarksPhotography/pr
2 October 2012

It’s a terrific idea from increasingly ambitious new writing company Paines Plough: build a temporary, wooden, in-the-round auditorium and tour it around presenting the works of three of our most promising playwrights. A finely tuned ensemble of four actors takes all the parts.

The most consistently sustained writing comes from Nick Payne, whose One Day When We Were Young traces a couple, Violet (Maia Alexander, making an exceedingly promising stage debut) and Leonard (Andrew Sheridan), down the decades after an illicit night of wartime passion in 1942. Clare Lizzimore directs with style.

If Payne hits his mark and then stays there, Duncan Macmillan soars giddily before crashing with a desperately overextended final section in Lungs. Man (Alistair Cope) tells his girlfriend (Kate O’Flynn) that he thinks they should have a baby, a bald statement that exposes major fault lines in their relationship. Every conversational step detonates an emotional landmine, and O’Flynn beautifully mixes killer comments, beaming smiles and shattering vulnerability.

Quite what Penelope Skinner was aiming for with The Sound of Heavy Rain is unclear. A hard-boiled, hard-drinking private eye probes the disappearance of a cabaret singer, but this doesn’t convince as a gumshoe piece, nor does it offer any useful reflections on the genre.

Until October 27 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)

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