Richard Bean is the dramatist of the workplace. But, after plays about breadmakers and trawlermen, he now turns to the wear and tear of marriage; and the result, while full of deadpan humour, leaves you unsure whether Bean's deadlocked duo are the victims of temperamental mismatch or social circumstance.
Technically, the play is ingenious. The action takes place in a Bridlington hotel suite and traces the shifting marital fortunes of Eddie and Irene: Bean's Ayckbournian trick, however, is to present the three chosen time-periods simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Whether they are nervous 18-year-old honeymooners, a middle-aged couple morosely celebrating their silver wedding or long-separated 67-year-olds enjoying a climactic reunion, the three Eddies and Irenes inhabit the same space while suffering the depredations of time. You admire Bean's cleverness while wondering exactly what he is saying. On one level, his play resembles Anne Tyler's An Amateur Marriage, in suggesting that wedlock is always a lottery. Even the honeymooning Eddie and Irene seem to be on different sexual rhythms and his entrepreneurial adventurism contrasts with her innate bookishness.
It's no surprise to find that by middle age he is a bankrupt arsonist whilst she is a night-school adulteress or that by old age their lives have diverged to the point where she is a politicised baroness and he is a suicidal solitary.
But Bean also implies that Eddie and Irene are undone by professional misfortune in that his ambition to set up his own retail business is ruined by the collapse of the fishing industry. But, while it is good to be reminded of financial reality, Bean leaves you unsure whether Eddie and Irene are doomed by acts of God or a shortage of cod.
Bean's best quality is his dark humour, most evident in the wry encounters between John Alderton's wonderfully lugubrious old Eddie, who says of his shrink "he's the sort of bloke who'd piss on yer chips", and Marjorie Yates as his newly elevated wife. There's also a mordant irony in seeing how the corner-cutting of Liam Garrigan's young Eddie turns into the downright crookedness of Jeremy Swift as his middle-aged self, for whom the road from Hull is paved with bad intentions.
But, while there are many felicities in Paul Miller's English Touring Company production, you can't help feeling that Bean's natural habitat is the workplace rather than the bedroom.
· Until February 7. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
