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Honeymoon Suite

  • opened: 1/12/2004
  • closed: 2/7/2004
  • Royal Court Downstairs
  • Box Office: 020 7565 5100
  • Details:
  • Summary: Checkout theARCHIVE. Hull playwright Richard Bean, with four premieres in the space of a year, looked poised to break from ‘promising’ to ‘major’ leagues in Honeymoon Suite, billed as a play looking at what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had survived. In the event, such a description proved an immensely elliptical account of an Ayckbournesque play of theatrical ingenuity, with three couples simultaneously padding the same room of a Bridlington hotel: Eddie and Irene are 18, and newly wed. Tits and Izzy are in their forties and bleakly celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. Whitchell and Marfleet are having what looks like a final encounter, differing over the necessity of a divorce. The same couple, so it transpires, at three different stages in their lives; the critical verdicts have been almost as fragmented, some reviews suggesting Bean has fully lived up to the pledge of earlier work, others far from impressed. Alistair Macaulay in the Financial Times argued: The way it gradually unlocks painful aspects of the past is in the Ibsen tradition, while its rich supply of quick, dry humour is entirely English. "What d'yer call that?" "A kiss." "I've had more fun syphoning petrol." Bean's Under the Whaleback last year was harsher and felt more substantial, but Honeymoon Suite, so subtly constructed, is the more multilayered. Fear, loss, hope, aching sadness, determination come to co-exist in one room, along with drollery, tenderness, intimacy.’ Robert Gore-Langton in the Daily Express pronounced it ‘a real delight’: [John] Alderton provides a brilliant comic turn as the eccentric older Eddie, with Marjorie Yates as his estranged wife. Jeremy Swift and Liam Garrigan are both excellent as Eddie’s younger selves in the days when he was making his way in the fish business. Sara Beharrell is terrific as Irene the bride, as is Caroline O’Neill as the embittered housewife she becomes.’ ‘How delightful,’ exclaimed Michael Coveney in the Daily Mail, awarding four stars, ‘to see John Alderton ambling into view as old Eddie Whitchell, a pont-tailed hippie hobo with a penchant for making pointless courtesy calls to small businesses.’ Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard scoffed: ‘Bean's shallow, clichéd idea, is endlessly to remind us how youth's high hopes of enduring love and happiness are betrayed by time and bitter experience. But there is scant sense of the different periods or of social change. The verbal comedy depends either upon dreary repartee or philistine jibes at such unfair targets as lesbians, sociology and bidets.’ In the Times, Benedict Nightingale suggested: ‘For all the quality of Paul Miller’s cast, it’s not always easy to see quite how Liam Garrigan has successively become coarse, go-getting Jeremy Swift and then John Alderton, or how Sara Beharrell has evolved into Caroline O’Neill and tough, wise Marjorie Yates. Still, Bean’s dialogue is high in quality and often good fun.’ Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph took the opposite tack: ‘Bean combines superb observation of character with a satisfying plot, involving arson, manslaughter and infidelity, and you are on the edge of your seat throughout, anxious to understand every detail of the couple's lives. What has stopped Eddie in his entrepreneurial tracks, turning a successful fish merchant into a semi-derelict shoplifter? And how on earth did Irene, the daughter of a trawler deck-hand, become a baroness?’ Michael Billington detected a central uncertainty in Bean’s attitude to his characters: ‘Bean implies that Eddie and Irene are undone by professional misfortune in that his ambition to set up his own retail business is ruined by the collapse of the fishing industry. But, while it is good to be reminded of financial reality, Bean leaves you unsure whether Eddie and Irene are doomed by acts of God or a shortage of cod.’ Paul Taylor in the Independent wrote approvingly: ‘His terrific ear for the salty, gutsy language of the north-east - previously demonstrated in dramas depicting life on a North Sea trawler and on the night shift of a Hull bakery - bestows an earthy comic warmth on the proceedings and ensures that the privileged triple perspective never feels like a heartless, gloating prank at the expense of the characters.’
  • Author: Richard Bean
  • Director: Paul Miller
  • Composer: n/a
  • Lyricist: n/aSet Designer: Hayden Griffin
  • Lighting Designer: Andy Phillips
  • Costume Designer: n/a
  • Choreographer: n/a
  • Cast Details: John Alderton (Whitchell); Sara Beharrell (Irene); Liam Garrigan (Eddie); Caroline O'Neill (Izzy); Jeremy Swift (Tits); Marjorie Yates (Marfleet).