The Ballad of Hattie and James
A ballad tells a story and writer Samuel Adamson starts his with a narrative misdirection: a woman is filmed playing a piano at St Pancras International and the footage goes viral, reuniting her with a man who professes still to love her. This looks like it’s going to be that story. But it’s not. And that’s precisely the point. As the play zips between the 1970s, 1990s and pre- and post-COVID-19, nonconformist Hattie (Sophie Thompson) and uptight James (Charles Edwards) meet as very different, talented teenage pianists at a cross-school production of Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera ‘Noye’s Fludde’. They rub each other up the wrong way, but like Velcro – forging a friendship that flies catastrophically apart after a tragedy. Like his previous play at Kiln Theatre, ‘Wife’, Adamson plays deftly with gender and expectation. The script wheels around and upends what we think we know about Hattie’s decline into self-destructive alcoholism and James’s success as a composer for an anodyne, oh-so-’90s Richard Curtis-style film about a cutout of a female character whose cancer teaches all the other male characters something. Richard Twyman's assured production doesn’t stint on showing the pain of the betrayal at the heart of the story, but also doesn’t neglect the beauty of the music. This is embodied by pianist Berrak Dyer, whose on-stage presence is far more effective than Edwards and Thompson pretending to play. She’s like a witness – providing fleeting moments of grace as they rest