We can’t change what happened in our previous relationships, before we met our current partners, can we? Provided we’re honest about them? That’s one of the questions that is touched on, although not fully explored, in Hannah Patterson’s adaptation of Andrew Haigh’s film 45 Years, presently at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester.
Before Geoff met and married Kate, he was holidaying in Switzerland with his previous girlfriend, Katja, who came to an untimely death by falling into a glacier. Her body was never found or recovered – until, in a bolt from the blue 45 years later, Geoff receives a letter from the Swiss authorities informing him that her body has been found, still trapped in the ice. Obviously, this would be upsetting news to anyone, bringing back those awful days at the time of her death. But what now? Should he do anything about it? Travel to Switzerland to view the body? After all, he’s no spring chicken. And why did the authorities contact him, 45 years later, at an address that they wouldn’t have known about – unless he’d been keeping them updated?
Perhaps the ultimate question is, can Geoff and Kate’s solid, if unexciting, marriage withstand going over old emotions and allegiances without breaking, glacier-like, under the pressure? The play attempts to analyse the family unit without ever making anything too obvious, or overstated. Obsessions are suggested and secrets are suspected without being fully exposed. As Geoff tries to balance his feelings today with 45 years ago, Kate makes tiny discoveries which suggest that Geoff and Katja were perhaps more established as a couple than she realised. When Kate asks Geoff if, had she not died, would he and Katja have married, and he concludes that they would have done, you can feel the knife silently piercing her heart. Of course, that was before they had met, and all’s fair in love and war. But how come he had never told her before? How come she had never asked?
Let’s look at the facts: Geoff’s first girlfriend was Katja; she died in mysterious circumstances. He then married Kate. If she discovers that Katja’s death was anything other than a tragic accident, will he bump her off before he next marries, say, Katarina? As Johnny Nash once said, there are more questions than answers. The problem with 45 Years is that it offers us an immensely intriguing set-up but deprives us of any real resolutions. Maybe Geoff and Kate survived 45 years by simply not talking to each other. Prasanna Puwanarajah’s direction certainly suggests they live as separately as possible even when in the same room – there’s no sofa here in James Cotterill’s anodyne set, their separate chairs are always placed at a distance from each other. 45 Years is a delicate, repressed little play, more of an intellectual challenge than an emotional one. Any passion is firmly controlled – voices are rarely raised and tempers are rarely frayed. It’s all very artfully done but it doesn’t feel like real life.
Whilst the cream carpeted set reflects absolutely the blandness of Geoff and Kate’s marriage, Guy Hoare’s lighting design nicely accentuates critical plot development moments (such as they are). The device of having occasional dripping water from the ceiling could be construed as suggesting potential cracks in their relationship; or, as Mrs Chrisparkle more cynically suggested, it merely indicated that their roof was leaking.
Certainly, the powerhouse pairing of Gabriel Byrne and Geraldine James as Geoff and Kate provides the impetus that the play needs to see it through its full 80 minutes. Ms James is especially watchable, conveying Kate’s thought processes with tremendous clarity, including those moments when she decides she doesn’t want to think anymore. After all, she’s discovering that, just maybe, she has played second fiddle in Geoff’s affections for all these years. Gabriel Byrne’s Geoff is more eloquent in the things he doesn’t say, or perhaps those things he’s forced to say but he’d sooner keep hidden. Between them they do their best to bring to life the text’s intricate cross-shading of various hues of grey, frustrating an audience desperate for answers, but being true to the characters. Gillian Bevan plays their friend Lena, primarily there to add a little variety to the grey, but in every practical sense creating even more vacuum between Geoff and Kate.
This is a Marmite production. I came out of it a little frustrated by the storyline but very impressed with the acting and the fascinating premise. My three theatre companions all sported various levels of unimpressed, including the always damning that’s 80 minutes of my life I’m never getting back. The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere between the two. However, there are elements to the play that stretch the imagination thinner than the surface of a glacier. If that slide projector’s been up in the attic for 45 years, Kate is immensely incurious!
Three-sy Does it!