Unexpected Man (tour)

Jimmy Saville got it just right when he said “let the train take the strain”. I love a good train journey, sit back in your chair, let the country side glide by like some perpetual green movie screen, enjoy a good book, maybe a glass of wine and arrive at your destination refreshed and invigorated for the adventure ahead.

Yasmin Reza’s The Unexpected Man, written in 1995 and translated by Christopher Hampton finds us, as luck would have it, on a train journey to Frankfurt. Peter Bowles plays the role of The Man and Sian Phillips, that of The Woman. No surprises there. You can imagine the situation, and how many times have we all been there: two people in a carriage, eying the other up, discreetly pigeon-holing each other yet never daring to so much as acknowledge the other’s presence or even existence. This ‘co-existence’, as always with Reza’s detailed and involved pieces, comes with a twist: the man is a writer, well known, and, typically, the woman has his latest book, The Unexpected Man in her handbag.

Peter Bowles as the writer, Paul, is Prussian in his bearing: immaculately turned-out and irascible in all he does as he enters the twilight of his life, obsessed with a lack of sleep, new laxative remedies and the sex lives of others. He is the ultimate parody of the angry old man. Sian Phillips, the foil to Bowles’s man is full of hope, compassion and understanding and yet cuts a rather sad lonely character searching, perhaps in vain, for love and company in a world where her children have now fled the nest. Both are superbly cast.

This is heady stuff and indeed Deborah Bruce’s tight production certainly brings The Unexpected Man to life but I cannot pretend that the journey to Frankfurt is anything other than long and, sadly, just not engaging enough to hold an audience’s attention for Reza’s, undeniably skilled, 80 minutes of intense dialogue. The ultimate exchange is a welcome relief but a long time in the coming. Imogen Cloet’s design is dark and tending to the foreboding, adding a further mantle of doom over the play which is already melancholic enough once you dig beneath the humour of the couple’s mental exchanges.

Sad to say though, if I was a child, I would have been asking Mum how long before we got home.

– Harry Bucknall (reviewed at the Richmond Theatre)