Robert Holman is a hard writer to pin down: at his best, as in Making Noise Quietly, he expertly charts the intersection of ordinary lives and momentous events. His new play, a five-act work for two actors dealing with the pressure of unspoken love, has moments of great beauty but also seems strangely abstracted from our everyday world.
Holman reveals his hand slowly. He introduces us to two men who occupy a rambling old house in north London. Francis is 35, practical and hard-headed. Penrose is 21, whimsical and confused. Since both men refer to the house’s late owner, whose funeral is about to take place, as “Daddy” we naturally assume them to be brothers. But it turns out that Francis, brought up in a care home in Northumberland, was initially employed as the gardener and only gradually turned into an adoptive member of the family, acting as Penrose’s guardian and protector.
With great finesse, Holman unravels the complex interdependence of the two men. One especially powerful scene shows them revisiting the place where Francis grew up: as Francis assiduously strips the bark off a twig to make a bow and arrow for Penrose, we get a keen sense of the former’s rooted kindness and the latter’s inherent childishness. But the implications of the relationship only became clear to me in a later scene, on top of Hampstead’s Parliament Hill, where Francis gazes at Penrose with tender longing. This is really a play about two men who are either too shy or guilt-ridden to express their love for each other. It is a rich theme but, by the end, Holman’s oblique approach turns into diffuseness and I began to long for the introduction of a third character to up the dramatic stakes.
Robert Hastie, who directed My Night with Reg, comes up with a beautifully spare production free of superfluous movement. Although they never touch, there is also a sense of molten intimacy between the two characters. Andrew Sheridan exactly catches Francis’s guarded watchfulness and the depression that derives from thwarted love. Matthew Tennyson is not only pitch-perfect in his portrayal of Penrose’s arrested emotional development but also sings a Gluck aria from Orphée and Eurydice with extraordinary purity. The acting is first-rate and Holman is very good at exploring the waywardness of passion, but I sometimes wished his characters would come clean. At close to two-and-three-quarter hours, this play exemplifies restraint run riot.
• Until 11 April. Box office: 020-3642 6606. Venue: Print Room, London.
• Buy 2 tickets for the price of 1 until 29 March. For more, go to theguardian.com/extra
