[title]
The old jokes are the best.
Richard Bean breaks no new ground with his story of a bickering old Yorkshire couple and their upwardly mobile children now having to deal with them, but there’s plenty of good gags and enough heart to enjoy him not doing so.
We’re in Flo and Jack’s home, chintz-heavy, with furniture that’s so dated it’s fashionable again. They’re in their nineties. No internet, endless cups of tea, relentless bickering. They’ve invited son Robert and daughter Tina to visit, both in their fifties, one a successful author and the other a business manager for a chain of private GPs.
It’s a familiar idea: the generational split between parents who’ve lived and worked in a particular place for their whole lives – here, Wetwang specifically, where Bean’s own parents lived briefly – and the generation of their kids who got educated, left and boomed.
But even if the tropes are familiar, it’s a good laugh. The gags are constant, the best coming from the loving/bitter exchanges between ex-cop Jack and Flo, 70 years married, played by stalwarts Alun Armstrong and Marion Bailey.
They bring to life Bean’s loving portrait of a couple – based partly on his parents – that’s like every fractious old long-married pair (bits of every sitcom old couple from the Garnetts to the Royles are in here) while also completely distinct.
Bailey, a late cast replacement, is as excellent as always but she’s nowhere near 90 and sometimes gets caught up in trying to act old. Armstrong is the most natural presence, his face only lifting its set-in scowl to make room for utter exasperation. He fronts a cast that sometimes overplays to the point that they dilute rather than bring out the comedy in the dialogue, possibly the result of having two directors in the forms of Richard Wilson and Terry Johnson.
It’s interesting Bean has focused so specifically on these two generations, rather than bringing in millennials, Z-ers or anything else. It makes the play feel quite dated, revisiting old ideas packaged with new jokes. Or that’s how it seems for a big chunk of the play anyway, a funny and entertaining piece, a classic setup, a stab at something state-of-the nationy by focusing on the class divide, wealth divide, political divide, geographical divide within one family.
As the play goes on, though, it becomes clearer and subtler: this isn’t actually a current affairs play. It’s a eulogy for what’s already gone, or is about to disappear. The importance of listening to those stories you’ve heard a thousand times, of relishing the moments in your parents’ bickering company before it’s too late.
Bean overstuffs things. There’s too much filler and he gets sidetracked by a subplot that provides a twist to a play that doesn’t really need one. These distract from a piece of writing with a strong core: a play that revels in its sentimentality because it knows that mortality can cut it short at any moment.