On the Shore of the Wide World

Family is the cradle for most drama – and in American theatre, it’s a well-worn setting for some gut-wrenching classics. On the few occasions when family is the focus in British theatre – as in this 2005 play by Simon Stephens – cathartic family showdowns appear less frequently than they do in productions from across the Atlantic.

On the Shore of the Wide World is a lengthy, almost soapy, saga set in dreary Stockport around Manchester where three generations of the Holmes family dream of freedom and sexual escape – but take little action and talk of everything but.  No one, it seems, will leap from the shore.

Alex Holmes (Graeme McRae) at least has youth on his side, and a spunky straight-talking new girlfriend in Sarah (Lily Newbury-Freeman); they even escape to London until Stockport inexplicably draws them home.  These young actors – and Alex Beauman as the appealingly oddball younger brother Christopher – deliver the play’s best scenes, as they smoke cigarettes and deadpan deep, teenage talk of nothing.

Meanwhile, the Holmes parents each nudge closer to sexual infidelities, fuelled further by the grief of a family tragedy, but each draws back and returns, without real explanation, to home. 

There are clues perhaps in the Holmes grandparents, with Paul Bertram as the alcoholic abusive Charlie and Kate Fitzpatrick as his restless wife. They too each dream of escape and what romance could be, although the writing is less successful at making this relationship as comprehensible as that of the parents.  Reflecting on his own father, Charlie expresses the central theme that each generation raises their children better than their own parents.  But he has to be drunk to say it. 

Similarly, his son Peter can only touch on a life truth to Dad when Charlie is near dead. Huw Higginson, however, is compelling as the practical open-faced Peter Holmes.  After ten years in uniform on The Bill, he’s a natural at this British milieu and its northern rhythms.

Simon Stephens has written a sometimes beautifully orchestrated script which weaves its short scenes together well and has moments of real emotional power.  Most scenes feature just two actors, while the others sit around the small Stables’ stage area and bring an intensity by their watching.

But action is sparse (and cramped) and the talk lengthy as each character sidesteps the truth with tangents of seemingly innocuous chat.  The introduction in the second act of secondary characters to the family further slows the pace in Anthony Skuse’s production.  While sexual infidelity burns as a need, surely there are other dreams and possibilities which could be reached from the wide shore – but the focus here stays limited on the sexual.

At the end, we arrive finally at what is an inexplicable image of family unity, somehow papering over the cracks still left largely unsaid.  It seems, in conclusion, a rather slight theme: it’s not so much the drama but the secrets which bind families together.

Rating: Three stars out of five