Review: ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG at Park Theatre

Stuart King 4 March, 2025, 11:12

We discover Violet and Leonard in a hotel room during the war — April 1942 in fact — the night before he is due to be shipped off. Their inexperience and nervousness around each other, betrays thoughts of more portentous matters which must surely have overshadowed and overwhelmed many a young couple wanting to express their love and commitment for each other before the inevitable separation.

Cassie Bradley and Barney White in One Day When We Were Young at Park Theatre. Credit Danny Kaan.

As the doodlebugs descend and the set and lighting designers (Pollyanna Easton and Henry Slater) get their moment to dazzle the hell out of the audience, (quite literally), the couple rearrange the furniture and exude something of the blitz panic which must surely have been a terrifying nightly ordeal for many. Aidan Good’s sound design also contributes considerably to the overall impact in this scene but is generally more subtle throughout the remainder of the play.

Almost as inevitable as the separation, is the second segment which reunites the couple years later, though Violet (Cassie Bradley) evidently gave up waiting for Leonard (Barney White) and moved on with her life. Now married to a music teacher, she has two children and teaches piano to youngsters in her spare time. Here the play stabs at pathos and heartbreak as Leonard exhibits bitterness that his sweetheart didn’t wait for him and whilst she clearly feels an attraction and yearning, her brittleness at the accusation makes her defensive and they part once more.

Unfortunately, there’s something altogether formulaic in the nature of the storyline, rendering the couple’s post-war scene, rather plodding in Nick Payne’s play. The antithesis of his successful Constellations, which pondered innumerable metaphysical outcomes for a couple, the narrative here is all too leaden with predictable period references to washing machines and television sets and leans too heavily on the two actors to imbue their characters with stoic sensitivity of the kind we are encouraged to believe was at the heart of every morally upstanding Brit and who counted self-sacrifice as their duty in service to the greater good of King and Empire.

Finally a slower and bespectacled Violet arrives from Bath to visit Leonard at his home in Stanstead. His mother recently died and he passes their meeting referencing the stair lift and the trite legal case involving Jaffa cakes and VAT before dropping his own bombshell that cancer has spread to his bones. When the lights go out they light sparklers and gradually… line by faltering line… reach the end… (although one wonders if director James Haddrell couldn’t have helped conclude matters more effectively, 5 or 10 minutes earlier).

Plays at Park Theatre until 22nd March.