Review: Just Before Sunrise, Alma Tavern

Love, companionship, ageing, parallel universes, the patterns in the stars… this production by Bristol’s Deadpan Theatre takes aim at some big subjects – and pretty well hits its targets.

Deadpan show us moments early and late in the lives of Bruce and June, an astronomer/academic and dancer who meet as nervous university interviewees and end up spending their lives together.

Young Bruce (Jonas Moore) is captivating to watch – geekishly obsessive about his passion for the stars, tentative in his dealings with June (Jude Mack), his self-absorption leavened with a streak of self-deprecating humour. Moore’s myriad facial expressions, nervous speech tics and apologetic mumblings also enrich his character, while adding a constant undertow of twitchy humour.

Jude Mack’s Young June is very fine too. Quiet, even lugubrious at times, but with a watchful, feline grace, there is something fascinating about her character and quest in life – especially knowing, thanks to the parallel scenes with their older selves (of which more in a minute) that that quest may not be entirely fulfilled.

These scenes depicting the young couple’s courtship and early life together are interspersed with others depicting them as an old couple (played by Harry Trevaldwyn and Bryher Flanders). Here, there is a nicely enigmatic sense of lives lived almost, but not quite, to their full potential.

Trevaldwyn and Flanders, meanwhile, bring a different sort of drama to the roles of Old Bruce and Old June – he now steadily losing his memory but not, it seems, his grip on the shape of the heavens: she tired after a lifetime in his shadow, exuding a kind of wistful calm. Their scenes, looking back on lives well-lived but also facing the disappointment of diminishing horizons, are very poignant, all the more so when interplayed with the moments from their younger lives.

Max Kirk’s lyrical, confident and often thought-provoking script gives all four some sharp, strikingly lifelike dialogue. It also takes in a (very digestible) wodge of astronomy via Bruce’s thoughts on the stars and the possible reasons behind some of their uncanny patterns and movements (if nothing else, you’ll head straight for Venus’ Wikipedia page after seeing this performance).

Deadpan also make the best possible use of the Alma’s compact black-box set, treating it as an enormous blackboard onto which are scrawled a lifetime of celestial equations from Bruce and, poignantly smaller, a wish-list of life experiences from June.

A witty, poignant, intellectually chewy and often very moving portrait of both the spring and autumn of a relationship – and of our place in the grand scheme of things.

Just Before Sunrise continues at the Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol until Saturday, March 14. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.almataverntheatre.co.uk/theatre/what-s-on