Charles Hutchinson reviews Honeymoon Suite

11:58am Saturday 8th March 2008

ASIDE from the revival of Alan Ayckbourn's interlinking Intimate Exchanges octet in Scarborough, no set of plays by one writer on a Yorkshire stage has been more rewarding than Richard Bean's run at Hull Truck.

The row of Beans now numbers four - Under The Whaleback, Up On Roof, Toast and Honeymoon Suite - all of them directed by Gareth Tudor Price.

Premiered at the Royal Court in 2003, Honeymoon Suite has travelled the world with its tale of love, fish, arson and "the feminisation of work" before returning to port to play Bean's home city.

The language may be colloquial but the structure has attracted the attention of Australia, Spain, even Slovenia, each drawn to a theatrical device rooted in the multiple doors of French farce and redeployed here in a skilfully choreographed lattice that accommodates three couples, aged 18, 43 and 67, in the same Bridlington bridal suite simultaneously but divided by time.

The couples in this three-piece suite are one and the same: aspiring fish merchant and dobber Eddie (Marc Pickering in his Hull Truck debut) and his passive, Steinbeck-reading childhood sweetheart Irene (Thea Rowland), on their Fifties' nuptial night; Eddie, now a self-made businessman calling himself Tits (Martin Barrass) and Izzy (Meriel Scholfield), on the wedding anniversary night 25 years later when she reveals an affair; and broken, karma-living Whitchell (Roy North), reuniting briefly with his ex, by now high-powered barrister Baroness Marfleet (Annie Sawle), a Commissioner for the EU, whose policies have destroyed Eddie's fish industry in Hull.

There is so much to enjoy in Bean's incendiary, dark comedy: his savage and earthily comic Eddie, surprises; his resonant imagery (as when Tits says love should feel like a lump in your body); his bitter-sweet portraits of Hull and Brid past and present; and the way that one question asked by a younger Eddie may be answered in the next sentence by an older wife.

Tudor Price's casting is tremendous: the Hull-born trio of Pickering, Barrass and North look and move alike, mirroring restless mannerisms, while Rowland, Scholfield and Sawle are rightly more contrasting in the flowering of Irene from demure rose, through agitated and unfulfilled play-away wife to political vixen.

A suite success indeed.

• Honeymoon Suite, Hull Truck Theatre, until March 22. Box office: 01482 323638.

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