Time and Tide ☆☆
The Park Theatre London

You might think a play set in a sleepy backwater British coastal town would be dull as ditch water, and you’d be dead right. With sledge-hammer subtlety and zero evidence of subtext, this play is set entirely in May’s Caff, which never seems to have any customers.

The Caff’s owner, May (WENDY NOTTINGHAM) is a frustrated actress in her 50s, and has been in love with the same woman all her life, although she’s denied herself the happiness that being with her true love might provide. She’s selling the café because Cromer is changing, gentrification making her customerless café  decorated in in black and white photographs of Bette Davis and 1950s show posters unnecessary.

As Ken (PAUL EASOM), the local simpleton and bread man says, it’s going to become a Pret a Manger (we’re given the pleasure of this joke twice). May has been mentoring the only gay in the village, emo Nemo (JOSH BARROW) , getting him to memorise Bette Davis films. Nemo is off to drama school in that there London and the giddy heights of sex and the city, only he’s not sure if he wants to go, not sure if he wants to be an actor or whether he’s simply living out the dreams poor old May never had the guts to chase, being too tied to her late mother’s microwave.

With its wobbly set and lines like “I can’t fix this microwave”, there were glorious shades of Acorn Antiques, although how intentional I’m still unsure. When Nemo’s straight mate Daz (ELLIOT LIBURD) declares undying love, they somehow fuck without removing any clothing and then Nemo leaves, declaring the fuck nothing but a nice way of saying goodbye.

May has the same cavalier attitude to her girlfriend, with whom she was going to live in a static caravan in Suffolk, but decides she’d rather keep the café and start teaching her new protegé, Daz, all about Hollywood divas instead.

For me, the problem was a genuine lack of genuine conflict. The stakes seemed surprisingly low, and low stakes mean no drama. All the actors did a truly admirable job of flailing around, unsure whether to play it for laffs or high tragedy.

I kept thinking about Martin McDonagh’s  The Beauty Queen of Leenane and how it treats many of the same themes in a radically different way. McDonagh’s play offers a superbly subtle and graceful portrayal of small town lives and the crippling monstrosities it can turn decent people into, and how very far from that quality of writing this play is.

These are important and dramatic themes, especially for queer youth trapped in these places, but from the title onwards, this play had all the dramatic depth of an episode of Eastenders, with every character articulating their fears and emotions too easily, everything laid out on the surface with no hidden motivations to drive it into the dark places of the psyche that great theatre excels are exploring.

Time and Tide
By James McDermott
Directed by Rob Ellis
Until Feb 29th 2020
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Review by Jonathan Kemp

Queerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).