Writer and Director: Anna Stephen
Better Yesterday is a self-consciously literary play, a sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without an additional couple to act as audience to Sylvia and Howard’s tempestuous scenes. They’re a celebrity couple, actors forever in the glare of the world’s press. They’re currently playing the lead roles in a production of Macbeth and have come home to an oddly shabby flat after a performance. For reasons that aren’t always clear, old tensions start to simmer: Why, we might wonder, on this particular night? They have evidently been passionately in love once long ago but now are at loggerheads. We learn they are together again after a separation. Much is made of Howard’s infidelities, but somehow he fails to convince as a Lothario. Sylvia, on the other hand, is undoubtedly sexy, the queen of smouldering looks and smart wisecracks. We know we’re in for a bumpy night.
The setting of the play is vague. We might be somewhere in America – Sylvia’s mother has been living in Seattle. But we might equally well be in the UK. Either way, it has little influence on the relationship. Online one reads it’s set in 1977, although again the point of such a precise date is unclear. Their world at least needs to be one that predates mobiles, as an old-fashioned phone sitting prominently in the foreground is surely going to play some part in the plot.
Playwright and director Anna Stephen writes lively dialogue. She clearly knows her Shakespeare and makes good use of pertinent quotations. But the half-jokey idea cooked up by Sylvia of bumping off an unseen colleague fizzles out early on. There’s an ongoing riff about limericks which is used to foreground the word ‘demented’. But again this suggestion that Sylvia has hidden depths of malice disappears.
In the end, even at a mere 70 minutes, the show feels unnecessarily protracted, its rather old-fashioned study of actorly self-involvement having few real surprises. There is, admittedly, an unexpected plot twist near the end, but it serves mainly to defang the toxic relationship which the play has worked hard to create. The leads, however, are played competently by Dominic Farrow and Pip Lang,
Runs until 20 April 2024
