To Have and To Hold: this entertaining, poignant play positions Richard Bean as Alan Bennett’s heir apparent
It has been a while since Richard Bean gave us an indispensable play. One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), his uproarious Sixties rewrite of Goldoni, remains career-defining, but Bean’s facility for comedy can incline his craftsmanship to the facile.
His finest hours, balancing crowd-pleasing gags with nuance and quiet perspicacity, tend to have sprung from his home turf – relaying the lives of Hull bread-factory workers (Toast) and trawlermen (Under the Whaleback) or the changing fortunes of a family of Yorkshire pig-farmers (Harvest). And in returning to his roots in a direct way - drawing on his experience of having ageing parents who stayed put while their offspring headed south – he has produced a play for today that tilts us between pained recognition, laughter and tears.
It feels apt that Richard Wilson, who staged Toast, Bean’s debut, should share the directing honours with Terry Johnson on To Have and To Hold. We’re looking in on a domestic scene that has a sitcomish air of One Foot in the Grave. The opening moments find Marion Bailey’s Florence making her protracted deadpan entrance on a stair-lift, propelled in contrary directions by an insistent door-bell, rung by her visiting author son Rob, and the repeated summons of her cantankerous spouse Jack (Alun Armstrong), a former policeman (like Bean’s own late father).
The nonagenarian couple are a study in grudging symbiosis and double-act levels of daffy bickering. “[He’s] talking about going to Switzerland, to where you pay ’em to kill you,” Florence jovially confides about her ailing hubby to her son, who presumes she’ll talk him out of it: “No! I say, ‘Go! It’d do you good. Broaden your horizons””.
Beneath Bean’s customary sheen, there’s heartfelt subtext at work here, especially from Christopher Fulford’s rumpled Rob and his still more get-ahead, if no less shifty sister (Hermione Gulliford’s Tina), who flit between guilt-edged concern and grubbing territorialism, suspicious of the friendly interlopers (Adrian Hood’s hulking Eddie and Rachel Dale’s perky Pamela, a nearer-at-hand niece) who offer the care they’re too absent to provide.
Having just lost my mother, I found the elegiac portrait of imminent parental death and bereavement – and the sense of a generational way of life, ordinary yet inimitable, on the brink of erasure – all too poignant. But there are wider, stinging questions: the way we short-change ourselves by being too busy to bother enough with the elderly, and the possibility that the post-Sixties dream of personal fulfilment forfeits true contentment, however fusty. Beautifully played all round, this surprise-positions Bean as the heir apparent of Alan Bennett.
Until Nov 25. Tickets: 020 7722 930; hampsteadtheatre.com
