Writer: Brendan Murray
Director: Willie Elliot
Terry is in his 70s, slightly unsteady on his feet after a mild stroke, and quite content to spend all day in his pyjamas if he’s not going out. While he lives alone, his partner Barry makes time for him when he can – all the more difficult because Barry has a wife and two kids who know nothing about his other life.
Learning How to Dive looks at this unusual setup through a semi-autobiographical lens. Writer Brendan Murray, who also plays Terry, is open about his 30-year-plus relationship with a married man whose family knows nothing about him. Barry’s death is a fictional departure, but also becomes the inciting incident here, as his son Matt (Darren Cheek) discovers hidden correspondence revealing his father’s other life.
Murray’s dialogue persists with a dry, if mournful wit which, when at its best, is redolent of Alan Bennett or Victoria Wood. It diffuses the rage felt by the younger man who has found out, after his father’s cremation, that the man he hero-worshipped had a whole other life. As he realises that Terry knows nearly everything about their family, it unlocks some of the grief he is feeling around his loss.
Murray expertly weaves exposition and family history in ways that never feel like info dumps. Stories of how the two men met – a chance meeting in a Brighton sauna – are interwoven with Terry’s descriptions of growing old, both poignant and amusing (zip-up cardigans and sandals with socks are clothing choices he embraces that his younger self would never have).
There’s a sense that if Terry were a more abrasive character, if he were not so softly spoken and tender in everything he says, Learning How to Dive’s first act would descend into stereotypical shouting. That it doesn’t, even when Matt reveals something about Barry’s love of dancing with his wife (seemingly the only piece of information his partner kept from him), means that we get a portrait of a complicated man whose three and a half decades of lies become understandable – maybe even, in time, forgivable.
If Act I feels like a self-contained portrait, that is because it originally comprised the entire piece. The newly written Act II winds back the clock to the week previously, immediately after Barry’s funeral. While Matt returns at the top and tail of the act, this is very much a solo piece as Barry’s widow, Jill (Karen Spicer), talks aloud to her deceased husband as she prepares for life without him.
In this monologue, we come to understand how Jill has always understood that Barry had someone else – who she believes is the “other woman”. That spectre hangs over her recounting of their life together, from their courtship and marriage to the upbringing of their two sons.
Jill’s eventual discovery of the same correspondence that, in the play’s twisted timeline, Matt will find later to precipitate the meeting we have already seen in Act I, favours the same sense of quiet reflection and heartbreak borne by Terry’s meeting with her son. It is easy to understand that Jill has lived with a lifetime of quiet betrayal. Photos both confirm her suspicions about Barry’s other life and reveal many details she was unaware of; the quietness with which she takes in this news is more affecting than any raised voice could be.
Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, many gay people’s lives have been hidden from others. While society has done much to improve visibility, not least with legal recognition of first civil partnerships and then full marriage, there are couples, particularly those in our older generations, who will have to face mourning and grief in the same shadows in which they lived their lives. Learning How to Dive paints a heartfelt, humorous, compassionate diptych of lives affected by such secrecy.
Runs until 21 February 2026
