BWW Reviews: AS GOOD A TIME AS ANY, The Print Room, April 30 2015

Eight women, Londoners, of various ages reflecting the capital's extraordinarily rich admixture of class, ethnicity and wealth, sit on plain chairs and talk to us. They tell tales of loves lost, loves taken away, loves fading and loves never even started, set against their specific circumstances: those of the middle class woman with teenage children growing distant; those of the working class woman on the estate; those of the teenage woman with a baby she loves, but little else.

As the voices cross each other and return over the 90 minutes all-through production, two themes emerge in each woman's account of their lives. All of them worry about something beyond their control: that may be the long, slow descent to inevitable death, uncompensated by a husband long dead himself; or a son running wild with a bad set of lads and girls who are as likely to get pregnant as not; or a daughter stepping out of traditional norms of behaviour and into Western ways. All also harbour a sense of regret: for the man they could, maybe should, have married; the child they never had; the relentless drifting that seems to paralyse their decison-making.

Veteran playwright Peter Gill steers a careful path between the reductive stuff of soap opera ("It's family innit?") and the exquisite melancholy of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. As director, he coaxes some fine performances from his cast, in which Tessa Bell-Bridge delivers an understated, but deeply moving, Lily, a woman making the best of things and Eileen Pollock blazes as Bridget, a Belfast-born woman shaped by the convent who is struggling to feel at ease in her new world of hijabs and halal.

Productions like this stand or fall on whether you believe in the characters and then go on to care about what might happen to them - hence the success of the soaps. I found myself pondering on what lay in for these women, how they would resolve their anxieties, how they would establish a firmer foothold on life. I guess they wouldn't really - nor would they fall off. They would, as women (and men) in London do, plug away celebrating the good times and dealing with the bad.

As Good A Time As Any continues at The Print Room until 23 May.

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