John Godber doesn't believe in making things easy. Departures is his second new play in as many months, and to make things even harder for himself he has chosen to focus on his chronic fear of flying. Even a course designed to reassure nervous travellers has failed to quell Godber's aviational anxieties. Perhaps this play is meant to exorcise them.
But although the atmosphere is fraught with the anodyne awfulness of the average air terminal, Departures is less about mid-air disasters than mid-life crises, a topic that has been uppermost in Godber's imagination of late. His last play but one, On a Night Like This, featured an artist who wavers between his night-clubbing past and his pipe-and-slippers present. The most recent, Our House, boasted a writer who wavers between his wife and a sexy young assistant. Departures stars a middle-aged media type who wavers between a sexy young assistant and his wife.
It's certainly the sourest and most jittery play that Godber has written in ages. Structurally, it's all over the place - Dallas, Brussels, Frankfurt, Amsterdam - and though this is clearly intended to signal the fact that one departure lounge is very much like another, the scenes end up becoming fairly indistinguishable as well.
Pip Leckenby's sleek, grey set has a superior, club-class feel, but the device of flashing up titles to describe time and place means that scenes tend to develop through announcement rather than action. The story features those blase business types who circuit the world while seeing nothing but the airports, and leaves you with the sense of being hustled through the narrative while seeing nothing but the exposition.
But there are plenty of good jokes, and excellent performances under the author's own direction. Iain Rogerson is particularly affecting as the haplessly hesitant Jim, who fails to realise that a non-event in a Novotel with his voluptuous assistant is not the soundest basis for dismantling his marriage.
If the play shows occasional signs of strain, it's presumably due to Godber's heavy workload. Perhaps he should relax a little, book a holiday, get away from it all. Then again, perhaps he shouldn't.
Until tomorrow, then touring. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
