Back in 1978 Michael Bennett conceived a Broadway musical called Ballroom, in which silver-haired dancers looked back at their younger selves. Although Bennett's show bombed badly, it had a ghostly magic singularly lacking in John Retallack's amiably genteel, implacably English variation on a similar theme.
Retallack starts with a decent idea: he shows four solitary, widowed oldies nervously sitting out a seaside tea-dance and slowly coming together through a shared sense of loss and love of the light fantastic. Roy, a onetime actor, pairs off with Sylvia, a former ballroom champ who spent 48 marital years with her gay dance partner. Meanwhile Victor, besotted by his late spouse, finds consolation with Audrey, secretly glad to be rid of her stolid, unrhythmical husband. As we watch this oldtimers' mating ritual, we also get glimpses of the dream world inhabited by the characters' younger selves.
The format is fine but the domestic revelations come grindingly slowly: the audience realises, a good hour before Sylvia actually tells us, that her ex-husband was gay. One also yearns for Retallack to make greater dramatic use, as Stoppard did in The Invention of Love, of the pathos of age powerlessly looking back at the follies and mistakes of youth. What the show lacks is any real sense of interaction between the generations: when they do come together, as in an exuberant Dean Martin cha-cha-cha or a lazily elegant Tea For Two choreographed by Jack Murphy, the evening immediately takes off.
Admittedly I saw the show at a disadvantage: the Southampton Guildhall has a dismal acoustic that made even the amplified dialogue hard to catch. Other touring venues are bound to be better. In the circumstances, Gilbert Wynne, Linda Broughton, Graham Bill and Anita Wright gave admirable performances as the ageing loners and the four dancers who play their younger selves twirled and whirled with elan. It would be churlish not to endorse the message that the bereaved should learn to let go and live a little, but the definitive comment came from an overheard spectator. "Nice dancing and lovely music," she said, "but not much of a narrative hook."
· At Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield (01484 430528), until Saturday. Then touring.
