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Tthe story follows a week in the life of a couple approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. While Kate (Geraldine James) oversees the preparations, Geoff (Gabriel Byrne) receives a letter about an old friend who died in a fall in the Swiss Alps more than 50 years ago. Katya’s body is found, preserved in ice. “He’s still there,” he says, and his chilling story threatens that the family’s Norfolk village life will be somewhere else, maybe even smaller.
A short story by David Constantine the movie it is a gentle and gentle thing. Many of his emotions occur in unexpected moments and quiet revelations. What a treacherous business it is to put this on stage, so it’s interesting that Hannah Patterson is associated with a modest, seductive economy.
It’s great to see Byrne on stage again, even if he stutters or stands in his line. He makes Geoff look better and stronger than Tom Courtenay from Andrew Haigh’s 2015 film. James gives a lot of questions as Kate but there is noise, not because he played the part of Kate’s friend Lena in the film. Here, in the hands of Gillian Bevan, he is more of a sitcom sidekick than the imperious James Lena was.
Director Prasanna Puwanarajah infuses the story with a no-nonsense, homely and theatrical setting. It is set in a living room with one dresser and two chairs, but it is symbolic and surreal, and is cleverly transformed into a loft where Geoff has hidden memories, and photos of Katya.
There are short scenes from their whole week, tied together by dark and bursting music, like a kind of midlife Galaxies. Beth Duke’s vocal design features a psychological play with the family’s old songs, reminiscing dew; more bites and the sound of a strong, lonely wind that causes the Alpine mountain where Katya perished and the greater desolation, and danger, that Kate feels in her marriage.
It’s like a beautiful piece for a theater room with a nice stone finish. It doesn’t really grow in its emotional breakdown but it makes you think about the passing of youth, the secrets and deceptions in a long marriage and the love that is here, real and strong, against the memory of an old (great?) love that is forever small, forever dead.
