One Day When We Were Young, Park Theatre
Monday 3rd March 2025
How long would you wait for your soulmate? In “The Demon Lover”, a short story by Elizabeth Bowen published in 1945, a young couple make a passionate vow during the first world war. When he fails to return from the Front, she moves on and finds someone else to marry — only to be confronted by an uncanny meeting many years later. A similar sense of emotional disappointment and eerie encounters mildly pervades Nick Payne’s One Day When We Were Young, originally staged at the Sheffield Crucible in 2011, and now revived in a joint production by Park Theatre and Greenwich Theatre.
This time the story begins in April 1942 in Bath, two years into the second world war, as childhood sweethearts 18-year-old Leonard and 17-year-old Violet spend their first night together in a hotel room. He works as a delivery man for a local butcher and has been called up to serve in the army, while she is a bit posher, more RP accent, good at playing the piano — that sort of thing. Tomorrow they must part, so he is full of anger and fear of fighting, while she is nervous at the prospect of their separation. As air raid bombs fall on the city, we take our leave of this couple, and then meet them only twice again — in 1963 and 2002 — in this slim 90-minute two-hander.
Although little is made explicit, it seems that Leonard was posted to fight in the Far East, and ended up as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, before spending time in Australia. Evidently traumatized by his war experiences, he has not been in touch with Violet so she has moved on, and married another man. And had two children. When they finally meet again, in a public park, in 1963, the pain of their disappointed hopes is clear to both of them. Yet, at the same time, each of them feels a strong bond, almost a kind of supernatural affinity, a lifelong connection. In their minds, in their memories, the other looms large — like an image of lost content.
The third meeting is in 2002, when Leonard and Violet are in their late 70s. She has reacted well to the various changes in her life, and even written a book about them; he has been less adaptable. The feeling is of a deep loss of a relationship, underscored by the song that gives the play its title: “One Day When We Were Young” from Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for the 1938 film The Great Waltz. This could make for some deeply emotional dialogue were it not for Payne’s decision to make Leonard deeply inarticulate: clearly, he is a trauma victim, but his inability to express himself makes him difficult to empathize with, and robs the audience of the chance to explore the feelings of both characters. In fact, the play ends exactly at the moment when both of them hover on the edge of expressing themselves. Somehow this is unfairly tricksy.
Instead, Payne gives us some lovely moments of social awkwardness, as this couple struggle to fully express exactly what each of them is feeling. These exchanges are very English, with the typical uptight character of people in the stoic 1940s extending for decades afterwards. However, it does make for some rather constipated and undramatic storytelling. Likewise, the play’s aim of giving an account of social change over the decades is not very revealing. We hear about wartime rationing, consumer goods in the 1960s and mobile phones in the new millennium, but none of this is very interesting. It’s all too familiar.
Despite the thinness of the emotional expressiveness, which may be very realistic but is quite frustrating for an audience, James Haddrell’s revival features good performances from Barney White and Cassie Bradley as the working-class Leonard and the more middle-class Violet. Both are convincingly uneasy in the first scene, and a touch vulnerable, then more spiky in the 1960s, while their final meeting is gentler and sadder as both actors visibly age. Pollyanna Elston’s set conveys the three time periods a bit clumsily, with the actors changing the furniture themselves. But although the acting is good, it can’t really make up for the slenderness of the plot.
This review first appeared on The Theatre Times
- One Day When We Were Young is at Park Theatre until 22 March.
