Mature female actors rightly complain about a lack of meaty roles, but James Hogan attempts to fill the gap with these two chunky playlets. Even if the first is vastly superior, at least both give the highly accomplished Lynne Miller the chance to play two women well past the verge of desperation.
Ivy, whom we first encounter, is a sacked hotel employee offloading all her grievances on to a reluctant male colleague. Hogan gives you a genuine sense of Ivy’s past as the queen of a Blackpool cocktail bar, of her violent resentment of a younger, sexier colleague and her memories of a brief moment of passion. Miller also makes you see why Ivy is both an unemployable menace and a figure of sadness as she clings to a tattered letter from the waiter who got away, and Jack Klaff is gruffly plausible as the colleague engaged to see her off the premises.
Ivy offers a memorable glimpse of a desolate life. With Joan, on the other hand, I could never quite believe in the veracity of the past. Here we see a married woman with a painterly and poetic instinct, reliving the memory of a recent trip to Venice with her patronising pedant of a husband who can’t wait to see the back of her.
Hogan gives Joan one good Beckettian line when she tells her husband “together we live apart”, but it is hard to accept their marriage has withered, since it seems never to have bloomed. Klaff also looked uncomfortable as the shuffling husband, and it is left to Miller to make sense of Joan whose unlived life has been partly redeemed by an encounter with a platonic Venetian admirer. I enjoyed her performance, but for all Hogan’s empathy with the lost and lonely, I suspect the best double bills are built on contrast rather than repetition.
• Until 24 January. Box office: 020-7287 2875. Venue: Jermyn Street, London.
