Two characters take us through a relationship built up over a period of six months based on weekly overlapping meetings in a Yorkshire community hall. Denise from Zumba meets Harry from Billington Improvement Council bonding over mutual complaints about the kitchen, which is always closed, the toilet that is blocked and the room rental of “£5 an hour”.
Harry is bumbling and fastidious, Denise, in day-glo leopard print leggings, thinks of herself as a free spirit. She is chatty, he is taciturn, the script has the challenge of making the tedium of their everyday lives interesting. We are stuck in this room with them wondering how things will evolve.
The play has its moments: He brings her sandwiches and their relationship develops over a ‘guess my sandwich’ which become somewhat erotic when he blindfolds her. The balletic process of stacking the plastic chairs and lowering the trestle table of the community hall are oddly moving.
The relationship splutters as the widowed Harry finds out Denise is married; she wants a friendships anyway – ‘I just thought you were lonely’, she says which aggravates him even more. Arguments grow heated over rows about local politics ‘It’s a shame you spend every Thursday evening with those fucking horrible people’, Denise declares of Harry’s ‘friends’, while the befuddled Harry’s only grasp on life is trying to do some good – ‘I’ve cut verges, done meals on wheels – just trying to help someone out’. We can see their views are polarised, but part of the pleasure is to watch them struggle through this and reach a compromise.
Timothy Harker fits the bill perfectly, playing Harry straight, but bringing a smile to our face with his energetic Zumba dancing. Jilly Bond is a fine opponent, with her attempt to undermine his stodginess.
The piece keeps moving and engages us enough to be wondering what will happen. Sadly, the script is without enough humour or bathos; it needs to take us further and dig deeper into the characters’ background to make them more solid. As it won the Papatango New Writing award in 2017, I was expecting a spikier dialogue. In the end, I didn’t really feel I knew the characters well enough to care about them….and with such an ambiguous ending, I don’t really know what happened to them either.
Cast: Timothy Harker, Jilly Bond
Written by: Stewart Pringle
Directed by: Matthew Parker
Produced by: Parker Graham
Running time 1 hour 50 minutes including a 15 mins interval
Performance to 8th March 2025