Theatre review: Time and Tide

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The press officially get invited tomorrow; I could only fit in a trip to this during the preview period.

Presented by Relish Theatre, a Norfolk-based company that aims to showcase creative talent from the regions, if James McDermott's Time and Tide is a love letter to the seaside town of Cromer it's a very subdued one. On the end of a pier that's slowly sinking, May (Wendy Nottingham) runs the failing café she inherited from her mother - but not for much longer. Local businesses have been closing up and selling off their shops to chains for the last few years, and May has someone from Pret a Manger coming to view the premises. But first she has a full Monday's work to get through with the help of her two assistants. She didn't even expect to see Nemo (Josh Barrow) today as he's due to get on a train at 6 to go to London and begin a drama course. But he wants to keep himself busy rather than spend his last day in town moping over the fact that his best friend didn't show up to his leaving drinks.

Nemo's been smitten with Daz (Elliot Liburd) since they were at school but he's finally accepted that his straight friend is unlikely to return his feelings in quite the way he wants. May's plans to leave town, on the other hand, involve making a long-overdue move to be with a woman she's been in love with for years, but hadn't got up the courage to do anything about it until now.

Rob Ellis' production will hopefully tighten up a bit with a few more performances - an opening five minutes that's essentially just watching a kettle boil isn't a great start and the show currently struggles to recover from it - but there's definitely also a lack of drama in most of McDermott's play. It's a slow burn that could really have done with a lot more humour as it builds up the characters, but just ends up lacking much light and shade. The exception is the opening 15 minutes of the shorter second act, when the two young men finally confront what's been unspoken between them. It’s a lovely dramatic scene as we can see Nemo growing up and moving on before our eyes, while Daz is so tied up in things staying as they are that he doesn’t even know how he really feels about his friend any more. It’s a scene that shows real skill in the writing and Barrow and Liburd’s empathetic performances, and a story with the potential to be explored much further.

Unfortunately McDermott ends up focusing on his much less convincing theme of the slow death of small businesses; the trouble is the main proponent of keeping the café open is baker Ken (Paul Easom,) whose relentless romantic pursuit of May probably isn’t meant come across quite as sex-pesty as it does, but either way his advice that she throw every last penny of savings into a clearly unsalvageable business is entirely selfish. It doesn’t help that the café, while meant to be long past its best, is portrayed as such a disaster it’s downright distracting: With the menu consisting almost entirely of week-old spam sandwiches, and hygiene that would have any food inspector not so much close the shop, as burn down the pier just to be sure, May should be counting it as a miracle that Pret are willing to give her anything at all for the place, never mind trying to stave off the inevitable. Time and Tide shows McDermott as a writer capable of finding real heart in a story; unfortunately, and bafflingly, he’s chosen to focus almost entirely away from it.

Time and Tide by James McDermott is booking until the 29th of February at Park Theatre 90.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Gail Harland.