TNT
Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame, The Hour) joins forces with physical theatre company Frantic Assembly to create a tender evocation of the start and end of a fifty year relationship. For half a century Billy and Maggie have lived in the same house, gathering fruit from the peach tree in their garden and watching the starlings flock overhead.
We see them both as their older selves (when Maggie is suffering from a painful illness both know to be terminal) and – sometimes simultaneously, sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping – as their younger counterparts, William and Margaret, in the first decade of a partnership which promised so much. Like their names, their relationship changes subtly with the years. The children she longs for never materialise, the dental practice he sets up so expectantly fails to provide the fulfilment he anticipated, extra marital temptations threaten their fundamentally loving domesticity.
Yet they remain, essentially, the same people and the stylised choreography of directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett melts old (Sam Cox and Siân Phillips) into young (Edward Bennett and Leann Rowe) in a poignant production in which the fluidly expressive body language says every bit as much as the spoken word.
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