‘What’s wrong?” says a husband to his wife when he finds her rustling up hot milk in the small hours of the morning. “I’m not sure I love you any more,” she replies and her words leave the ground shaking beneath this couple’s feet.
It is an arresting opening to a marital reckoning which is a confrontation with midlife itself: its yearnings, disappointments and wrong turns unravelled in this capacious Essex kitchen-cum-living room, as Maggie (Claire Rushbrook) and Gary (Daniel Ryan) wrestle out their differences.
The second in David Eldridge’s trilogy exploring love and relationships, which began with Beginning, it similarly unfolds over an uninterrupted 100 minutes of conversation. But Maggie and Gary are not the couple of the first play. They are a decade older, on the brink of 50, with a young daughter and more than 12 years of married hinterland behind them.
Directed by Polly Findlay (who also staged Beginning), Rushbrook and Ryan draw our sympathies both ways. We withhold final judgment on the rights and wrongs of their marriage largely due to their very human and likable performances, even if they do feel too much like a generic middle-aged couple, entangled in the web of a burdensome mortgage, the juggle of childcare, overwork, boredom, loneliness, peri-menopause and stale sex.
Where Beginning captured the prospect of a shared future fizzing ahead, this play focuses on the backward glancing and inner audit of the middle years: is this what I wanted? Has marriage made me happy? If the first play was taut with expectation, this one is saggy with familiarity and knowing, both in form and content.
The same old gripes rise up between the pair repeatedly, giving the drama a circularity: his regret at not having more children, her resentment at his overindulgent fathering and having been left alone with the baby. There is a third party involved too – again a little predictably – which brings with it a chance to have a second go at life.
Gentle comedy leavens out the resentments and brings some good lines. When she suggests they move into separate rooms, he quips: “I don’t think they have conscious uncoupling in Essex. Unconscious coupling, yes …” But it takes away a certain edge and creates a foundational warmth between them so we do not fully buy into Maggie’s discontent. They seem like a sad, lost couple but without a deeply felt bitterness, cynicism or gut-wrenching anger.
Then again, uncertainty is built into the plot line and this is perhaps a couple not yet past the point of no return. Eldridge is incredibly good at dramatising a culturally specific world – an Essex couple from working-class backgrounds and with upwardly mobile ambitions – that we do not often see in anything other than satirical or comic mode. The class tensions between them are expertly drawn out: how Maggie’s family looks at Gary’s and how that stains the couple’s view of each other to some degree.
It feels like a true and tender representation of a marriage in its middle stages, a drama that is tepid at times, a little plodding and soft around the edges but forging on – much like middle age itself.
At the National’s Dorfman theatre, London, until 18 June
