It’s tempting to suggest that Jim Cartwright is no longer the writer that he used to be. Though his best-known work, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, was commissioned by the National Theatre, his last full-length play, A Christmas Fair, shared a venue with a local dance school in Malton.
Cartwright’s return to the Octagon in Bolton – where his play Two was originally presented – suggests his career has come full circle. Yet The Ancient Secret of Youth and the Five Tibetans (am I alone in wondering if this title would scan better the other way around?) is also sufficiently unlike anything Cartwright has attempted before to suggest that he may have entered a different phase.
The Five Tibetans are a sequence of ancient yogic exercises believed to hold the key to perpetual vitality (Bruce Forsyth is a devotee). In Cartwright’s play, a book containing the Five Tibetans falls into the hands of Penny and Douglas, a fractious pair of middle-class, middle-English fiftysomethings, through the agency of their old university pal Henry, an antiquarian bookseller from Bolton. A pact is agreed whereby all three agree to practise the regimen and reconvene in a year’s time.
In the second half of the play, Penny and Douglas are miraculously transformed – and are played by a pair of much younger actors. It’s the kind of irreverent twist on the time/plausibility continuum you might more readily associate with Alan Ayckbourn than Cartwright. It sets up a peach of a line, when the rejuventated Douglas looks at the unaltered Henry and asks: “Lost your page, did you?”
But if the premise stretches credulity, Cartwright’s characteristically long, unspooling cadences carry an emotional truth that few can match. After a slightly stolid start, the play becomes a deeply affecting meditation on age and whether the desire to recapture one’s youth is merely an opportunity to make the same mistakes with even more disastrous consequences. David Thacker’s unhurried production features a gloriously resigned performance from Eric Potts as the antiquarian Henry, who likens his “well-thumbed” life to laying aside a favourite book and realising that he has no desire to start another. Of course Cartwright, at 56, isn’t the same wise-cracking, alliterative whippersnapper who created Road. But if he’s no longer the writer he used to be, it may be that is because he has become even better.
• At the Octagon, Bolton, until 23 May. Box office: 01204 520661.
