Somewhere in outer space, the Actor tells us, Nasa’s Voyager probe carries the Golden Record, a compilation of life on Earth: “People having a good time. People cramming it all in.” Meanwhile, in Preston Road, time has stopped at the palindromic instant 04:40. Wakeful singletons Tom and Sara, staring bemusedly through bedroom curtains, catch sight of one another across the silent street.
It could have been conceived especially for theatres reopening after lockdown, this whimsical tale of people emerging from cocoons of isolation to connect romantically with one another and, in more peculiar ways, with their neighbourhood watch group. In fact, Ian Kershaw wrote the piece in 2018, when live theatre performed in the same space as its live audience seemed something we would be able to take for granted for ever. There again, Kershaw’s sci-fi-inflected plot also features a time-travel experiment; perhaps he knew something the rest of us didn’t.
The Greatest Play… was actually written as a solo show for Kershaw’s wife, Julie Hesmondhalgh, known to millions as Hayley in Coronation Street and currently appearing on our small screens in BBC One’s new “gothic pulp” whodunnit The Pact, as well as taking this production on its seven-venue tour of (mostly) northern England.
Using the barest of means – a dark carpet, a constellation of lightbulbs, a wall of shoebox-filled shelves – Hesmondhalgh brings a little world (and its footwear) to playful, audience-almost-participating life (aided by Naomi Kuyck Cohen’s set, as lit by Jack Knowles). Her performance, directed by Raz Shaw, is warm, relaxed, impeccably timed and multilayered. If you get the chance to see it, seize it. The Greatest Play… doesn’t knock Shakespeare off his perch, but it does make a terrific re-entry point to the kind of physically immediate, affecting, imagination-stimulating experience so many of us have been thirsting for for so long.
Talking of thirst – special cheers to the theatre’s at-seat drinks service, as well as to its other Covid-security measures.
