If you want to oppose one living male dramatist to another, try David Mamet and Robert Holman. Holman, now in his 60s, writes plays which uncurl so gently that the distance they travel comes as a surprise. The dialogue is delicate and inward, with none of the stichomythic punch that has become shorthand for realism on the stage. There is no violent action. Holman comes from a Quaker family. Watching his plays requires the steady attention you might hope for in a Friends’ meeting.
A Breakfast of Eels is unusual in being especially written for the two actors who perform it. That pays off in precision. Matthew Tennyson bambis in with maddening feyness. He is wondering whether he might attend his father’s funeral dressed “as a rainbow”. Andrew Sheridan, for whom Holman wrote Jonah and Otto, is a sturdier fellow, apparently confident and organised. Both talk about “daddy”, but in entirely different accents. They are unlikely brothers, and the play shows why. It does by a gradual erosion of secrets, in the course of which power shifts decisively, and almost every aspect of each character (sexual prowess, reliability, generosity and forcefulness) is altered.
Up to now it has seemed to me that Holman’s director of choice must always be the master of stealth and subtlety Peter Gill. Yet Robert Hastie directs with the filigree intensity that he brought to his triumphant Donmar production of My Night With Reg. One episode indicates the quality of acting and production. The two men sit together reading in the library of the grand house one of them has inherited. They fiddle with their glasses, occasionally look at their watches, steal glances at each other. Intimacy as well as wary curiosity is perfectly captured, in long minutes of silence.
• At the Print Room at the Coronet, London W11 until 11 April
