It is a long time since I have seen a tasselled lampshade on stage. Or an antimacassar. But then it is a long time since I have heard such gradually uncoiling, slowly deepening dialogue as that in David Storey’s The March on Russia.
When Storey died in March, he was celebrated for work based on his own early days: fictional and theatrical evocations of northern working-class life. His novel This Sporting Life (1960), filmed by Lindsay Anderson, drew on his career as a professional rugby league player: he was as much athlete as aesthete, and once hit the Guardian’s Michael Billington after an adverse review. The March on Russia, set in a retirement bungalow near the Yorkshire coast in 1989, has an intense naturalism that suggests personal experience: Storey bought his own parents such a bungalow. It might have been written to prove that lack of dramatic action does not mean dramatic inertia. This is an evening when a tiny movement, such as a light and unexpected kiss, can send a gasp and a sigh through the audience.
A couple marking their diamond wedding anniversary are visited by their three children. He is an ex-miner, out of school at 11 and down the pit till he was 65; she was timid and is now tense. The adult kids are used to the elderly grumping at each other and to their competitive ailments: his pneumoconiosis versus her hysterectomy. They are unprepared for the sadness of the secrets they let out. This is a drama of disappointment spliced with hope. Is the constant bickering really just banter, the sniping only display? Or is it the gruff amiability that is the pretence, covering up an abyss of grief? It is Storey’s skill to keep these questions up in the air.
In Alice Hamilton’s finely calibrated production all the performances are lively. But the evening belongs to the jubilee couple. To Ian Gelder, habitually jaunty but invaded by bewilderment and sudden sadness. His cheeks slowly drop towards his slippers. And to Sue Wallace as his wife, her snappy terseness – “There’s feelings and feelings” – undermined by anxiety. There is no explosion, but continual upset. James Perkins’s design makes a complete world out of two rooms. Only the kettle looks wrong. Surely this couple wouldn’t have had an electric jug? It is a tribute to the play that you feel you know them well enough to question it.
