A mismatched marriage of ideas

Richard Bean's aggressively vacuous comedy of marital manners, set in a Bridlington honeymoon suite, follows hard and heavy upon his muchpraised Under the Whaleback and The God Botherers. It borrows, wastes and varies the governing idea of Edward Albee's magical masterwork, Three Tall Women, in which three actresses, on stage together and playing the heroine at three different phases of life, converse with each other.

In Bean's play, a Bridlington honeymoon suite is simultaneously occupied by honeymooning lovers, a quarrelling, middle-aged married couple and an elderly pair who meet again after 23 years of separation.

Although all six characters have different names, it does not take that long to deduce we are watching the same couple occupying the honeymoon suite in the 1950s, the 1980s and in 2004.

But, in defiance of Albee's play, there are no conversations between the generations. Instead, the action in the seaview suite keeps aimlessly shifting from one duo to another. The actors, in Paul Miller's stilted production, mainly sit around when not involved in the action, looking either portentous, pretentious or extraneous.

Bean's shallow, clichéd idea, is endlessly to remind us how youth's high hopes of enduring love and happiness are betrayed by time and bitter experience. But there is scant sense of the different periods or of social change.

The verbal comedy depends either upon dreary repartee or philistine jibes at such unfair targets as lesbians, sociology and bidets. Bean's Under the Whaleback conveyed a strong sense of Hull fisherfolk's dangerous, damaged lives. Honeymoon Suite, set in a similar milieu, does no such thing.

Primmish Irene and hesitant Eddie Whitchell, well played by Sara Beharrell and Liam Garrigan, repetitively romance and reminisce. In their middle-aged and elderly manifestations, their dilemmas and circumstances smack of lurid, melodramatic contrivance. The suicidal aspirations of elderly Whitchell (John Alderton) lack all conviction. And when his estranged wife (imposing Marjorie Yates), now raised to the peerage, comes seeking divorce and supplies Whitchell with sexual relief, farcical silliness prevails.

Honeymoon Suite