Review: Our Share Of Tomorrow, Real Circumstance, The Studio, York, Theatre Royal, until September 25 (From York Press)

Review: Our Share Of Tomorrow, Real Circumstance, The Studio, York, Theatre Royal, until September 25

12:03pm Monday 20th September 2010 in Theatre By Charles Hutchinson

THIS is Real Circumstances’ third visit in four years to York Theatre Royal, where the Colchester company staged Limbo in 2007 and Lough/Rain in 2008.

Our Share Of Tomorrow breaks new ground for these Essex experimental theatre practitioners, as it is from the pen of artistic director Dan Sherer, a boundlessly energetic creative force who shares Badly Drawn Boy’s love of sporting a woolly hat at all times.

Once more he has favoured an improvised working practice, whereby his actors first create “fully-realised imaginary selves that can respond truthfully to any given circumstances”, hence the company name.

Unlike past productions, the cast did not work with Sherer from an already-finished script; instead he recorded the improvisations and then honed everything into a finished play: a love story that explores the grief of love and loss.

“At the heart of it, it’s a very simple story that deals with what do you do when you love someone but for whatever reason it cannot come about?” he says.

Boatman Tom Elfman (Jot Davies, from the Lough/Rain cast) emerges bare-chested from the water and calls out “Grace” upon seeing a young girl. She is in fact Grace’s lookalike daughter, Cleo Sparks (Tamsin Joanna Kennard), 15 years old now, and over from Ireland to seek out Tom.

Fifteen years before, when Grace herself was 15 and Tom a year older, he had asked her out as they sat on the quay, but their happiness was broken when she had to go away, whereupon Tom waited and waited for her.

Now she has returned, or rather she hasn’t; but the arrival of Cleo sparks Tom’s feelings once more, and so begins a journey through the missing years that toys with the audience’s emotions in a blur of reality and imagination while moving backwards and forwards in time.

That said, there is nothing more real than the head-butt administered on Tom by the protective former soldier who has accompanied Cleo, John Broughton (Toby Sawyer, brother of journalist and social commentator Miranda Sawyer, incidentally).

Sherer’s poetic, elegiac writing is full of intrigue and insight and even throws in a couple of deliberately incongruous jokes, while his directing is of the highest order too, his staging precise yet as elusive as trying to catch a sea fret. No scene is wasted or extraneous in this hour-long Fringe play where the tide of hope rises slowly but inexorably in Sherer’s desire to emphasise the need to “get off the floor, no matter what you’ve done”.

All three performances have intensity and mystery and an interaction fashioned in the heat of those early sessions, and James Cotterill’s set design warrants praise too, with its combination of a fish-netting relief and a quayside that at one corner turns into the brow of a boat.

You should go down to the sea today, tomorrow, this week.

Our Share Of Tomorrow, Real Circumstance, The Studio, York, Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.45pm plus 2.30pm, Thursday, 2pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk