Review: Trestle, Jack Studio Theatre

Even if you’re trying to avoid reading the news this week to escape the opposing political factions on the world stage square up to one another like insecure children, awareness of it will have crossed your path. We live in a world of polarised views where everything is black and white and there is no nuance, no middle ground, no desire to understand, or to compromise.

Though probably not intended as such, this timely play shows us why we need theatre to help us understand, to heal and to grow at times like these, as it touches on the very human issues that can either tear us apart or bring us together. Billed as a comedy (which it certainly is: pickle and pesto sandwich anyone?), this play gives so much more. While drawing on some fairly standard tropes (homely, late middle-aged Yorkshire folk in a village hall) this is highly original and unfolds into something broader and deeper.

Newcomer to Bilingham, Denise (played with a broad emotional range and plausible complexity by Jilly Bond) has only been in the village for six months but has had her eyes peeled and has a good understanding of the lay of the land, or so she thinks. She meets lonely local fusspot Harry (Timothy Harker) in the village hall as Harry closes his “council” meetings and Denise sets up her weekly Zumba class.

Their weekly meetings increasingly overlap in duration as well as metaphorically. As their encounters grow in length, it is in the second act that this play really starts to grow legs. We begin to see how Denise represents a progressive view of the world and Harry represents a more conservative view. Layers peeled back, they start to clash and reconcile, in incredibly nuanced work by the two leads that shows sentiment without being sentimental. There are no easy answers in this play and no convenient happy endings, just a real sense of how far we can go if we really value what life has to offer.

Stewart Pringle’s writing is original, assured and his voices are truly authentic. Familiar self-effacing Yorkshire humour sets the tone (particular praise for comic delivery here to Harker), but where he really succeeds is in the sensitive unwrapping of the micro-dramas that reveal the truth about the two characters. The two protagonists, not only in the autumn of 2017 but in the autumn of their lives, are drawn with forensic precision as they come to terms with their loves and their losses, and realising, despite their differences of opinion, there is room in each of them for multiple versions of themselves.

The carefully choreographed setting in which the rhythmic movement of furniture and the fine details of telling props and costume changes pin the storytelling very much on the canvas of our own lives, making it uncomfortably relatable in the way that good theatre should.

All of this culminates in a silent and economical epilogue that proves that the best theatre (and this is) can do so much with so little. Go and see what I mean: I promise you that you’ll feel better about yourself and the world you live in.

Written by: Stewart Pringle
Directed by: Matthew Parker
Produced by: Parker Graham Productions

Trestle plays at Jack Studio Theatre until Saturday 8th March