Review: An Hour and a Half Late, Theatre Royal Bath – ‘a comedy of sorts’

I wish I could rave to you about this two-hander. But sadly, An Hour and A Half Late will be an hour and a half you’ll never get back. But if you like that kind of lazy joke, then go!

The play, by Gérald Sibleyras with Jean Dell; adapted and directed by Belinda Lang, is – to be fair – a slightly promising offer: Peter and Laura (Gryff Rhys Jones and Janie Dee) lean slightly uncomfortably on the Farrow and Ball threshold of an empty nest, grandparenthood and wealthy (“loaded!”) retirement in “a big house” in Chiswick.

While Laura moans for 90 minutes about her ills (largely, that she “let him let her” be a full-time mother, which she loved doing), Peter tries to jolly her along so they can get out the house for dinner with lifelong chums.

Laura was a very precocious miners’ strike and Greenham Common campaigner (she’s only 53 but was a dedicated activist at the early ‘80s’ biggest moments), but something must have happened because she happily gave up work for full time motherhood – with three staff to help. For the last 19 years, she’s poured her creativity into maintaining a fiction of a torrid affair. But this dramatically manipulative weirdness is forgotten as quickly as it surfaces.

Peter (61) is a tax consultant who once failed to seduce a wealthy widow in hold-up stockings whom he met at work. He’s selling his share in the business to his business partner “for a fair price” and is excited about all the eating he will do when he’s retired. Even though Peter sits through the same 90-minute brattish whinge that we do, he loves Laura and (spoiler alert!) their love is deepened by the experience.

Griff Rhys Jones (Peter), Janie Dee (Laura) – photo: Marc Brenner

This flaccid thing is a comedy of sorts, but only in the sense that it’s a series of wearisome jokes are thinly threaded together by a concept of Chekohovian-level marital maplessness, in a script worthy of the thirteenth – cancelled – series of Man About The House.

None of the premises are explored – even comedically: tax consultancy; selling the business; the fake affair; the off-stage friends. Rather, they’re all used as confetti blown up in the air for laughs, then let to fall as we move on to the next one (slagging off the new-mum daughter-in-law, admitting to a failed seduction, riskily letting breadcrumbs fall on the carpet).

Don’t get me wrong – I survived on crumbs of hope (to be truthful, a repetitive diet of, “it MUST be 90 minutes now”) as each mini-riff on midlife-misery began. But I’m left with feeling like I bought a new LP from some great artists but was then dragged painfully through an endless succession of three-minute shallow dirges, none of which fulfilled the marketing’s gleeful promise.

Griff Rhys Jones (Peter), Janie Dee (Laura) – photo: Marc Brenner

I wish this wasn’t a hard read for those involved (including those theatres who have this on their upcoming schedules) – but I’m forced to ask how this script got on-stage, through all the checks and balances that production companies or actors have in place. Boxes were ticked, no doubt, but script quality wasn’t one of them.

The wonderful late Mel Smith, Rhys Jones’s much-missed comedy partner, adapted this play to be ‘darker’ than Sibleyras and Dell’s original, and took it on a national tour in 2006, playing the part of Peter. But this is not that adaptation, but one by the show’s director, Belinda Lang. Relying on big casting to fill seats when the material is so poor is treating audiences with disdain. There is great ‘empty nest’ comedy out there that would appeal to the same demographic. But this is not it.

An Hour and a Half Late is at Theatre Royal Bath, Sawclose, Bath, BA1 1ET on February 16-26 at 7.30pm, with matinee shows on Thursday and Saturday at 2.30pm (not February 17). Tickets are available at www.theatreroyal.org.uk.

Main photo: Marc Brenner

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