Review: Half Life (Theatre Royal Bath)

We hope, as we hit the autumn years of life, that we can look back on the past and smile about a life well lived, to reminisce over time spent with family and loved ones, having eaten good food, read great books and seen amazing places. Yet is that even realistic? Are we not just as likely to view the past through the prism of opportunities missed, of avenues not explored, of loves that could have been? Are we not as likely to view the past with regret, with the idea that our past was only a half-life, defined by what wasn’t as much as what was?

In John Mighton’s elegant 2005 play, here receiving its belated English premiere he hones in on the lives we rarely see on our stage. In a veterans' home in Canada Helen Ryan’s beautiful and poised Clara is slipping into the later stages of a devastating dementia, being able to recall in detail a dress she wore fifty years previously but unable to recollect what she had for breakfast a couple of hours earlier. When mathematician Patrick enters the home it brings back memories of a week during the war when life may have changed for these two people for ever. Yet the play questions what was true and what wasn’t. Are the reminiscences of Clara little more than misremembered moments, loaded with significance for her but of little consequence for another?

The Ustinov Studio has found their identity in recent years with undiscovered new writing from mainland Europe and North America. Yet these works also share in their DNA something slippery, never revealing all their secrets in first unravelling and making its audience work to decipher meaning. While someone like Florian Zeller combines formal precision with emotional heat that turns his works into hot tickets, Mighton’s work is on occasion a little too calculated. His other career as a mathematician comes too much to the fore and in the play, patterns fall into ordered shapes which lack the messiness and sheer chance of life. It is a work to admire but always keeps its audience one level removed; it works the brain more than it works the heart.

What he does do though is produce roles for actors who criminally often get overlooked. So often the focus is on the young that a certain vintage get relegated to little more than comedy cameo or sentimental turns. Yet here some of these performers are given three dimensional roles which they imbue with a lifetime of experience. Ryan brings out all the spiritual beauty of a woman who is slipping unaware into the ravages of a terrible disease but who is awakened by Patrick Godfrey’s spiky but charming past memory. In his roguish twinkle behind the craggy eyes we see the boy that once may have been before a lifetime of servitude to his country changed him.

When these two are together you remember that all the head rushing emotions of love are not just confined to the young. There are also detailed etchings from Raymond Coulthard as the son who is constantly challenged by this new turn of events, from Holly De Jong as a caustic resident of the home and Ishia Bennison as the matter of fact but caring home worker. Nancy Meckler’s production brings out the detail beautifully while not always capturing the pathos. Just like in life it doesn’t always give you what you want.

Half Life will play at the Ustinov Studio until the 5 November