But performances were forced and life round a teapot is simply dull

It would have been a very powerful play had the writer, who is also the director, cut the first half and concentrated on expanding the emotions and truths that merge in the second part. Plays are windows of life, you can look in closely at people and observe how they deal with a set of circumstances, fictional or real, while viewers discover something new about human nature or their history.

They also mirror experiences, provide an insight to how minds work and explore those invisible links people have to understand why and how incidents have come about. Tea…. A very British drama gives you an opportunity to get close to the characters only at the end of the story.

It’s 1946, Hitler has been defeated and with a promising future in a new free world life is so uncomplicated, a young couple is filled with high expectations and there is nothing that cannot be sorted over a good cup of tea, whether it’s a saddening family affair or an issue over inheritance money, but there are those family secrets that keep coming up and continue to carve the newly married couple.

Life is shaped by your decisions but what happens when they clash with your emotions and your passions?

The husband Michael, played by Morgan Thomas, can’t ignore how he feels and sordidly erupts when he realises that he made the wrong decisions. He finds himself battling with the very issues his parents had and that he sought to avoid for himself.

There are powerful messages here that should have been explored even further and the characters dissected even deeper. In the first half you are not engaged, the pace is slow, performances are forced and life round the teapot is simply dull. It is only at the end that you also realise that the cast is skilled, but somehow the ability and energy of the three actors fail to surface. It seems that the director has not made the most of what is a talented cast, and it is as though the actors have been given a chance to illustrate their characters only at the very end of the play.

Gabriella La Rocca

December 5, 2008