David Hare’s Skylight is a romantic comedy…of sorts, although I’m not certain if it would give your Valentine’s Day quite the right vibe. Set in 1990s London, Kyra is living her life without Tom, her married ex-lover, when out of the blue, first Edward (Tom’s son) and then Tom himself arrive at her chilly London flat to challenge her about her past.
If you exclude the unlikeliness of the premise (that both men choose to visit Kyra on the same wintery evening some three years after she left Tom), Skylight is a very realistic portrayal of a couple speaking about their past affair. They reminisce about their love story, viewing it through rose-tinted spectacles, but these memories are often interspersed abruptly by moments when they remember the things that annoyed them, the reasons why things ended between them. Hare’s writing is humorous, played out in the natural rapport of the actors, particularly Charlie Morgan as Kyra and Michael Taylor as Tom.
Part of the cleverness of this play is in the way Hare has brought the 1950s-style kitchen sink drama into a 1990s setting, where the entire action of the play takes place, quite literally, around the kitchen sink. This is Kyra’s world – she teaches children in a central London comprehensive, she travels on the bus, she lives in a tiny, unheated flat. Tom’s life has been elsewhere, in a big house in Wimbledon, in the business world, and with his wife Alice who died a year ago. He doesn’t make sense in this flat, in Kyra’s life. The claustrophobia of the setting is marvellous – the characters move around the kitchen/living room space, and the stage seems too small for the enormity of the emotions being played out. Tom constantly refers to the smallness and dinginess of Kyra’s flat, and there is a strong sense of financial and class divide, which the characters discuss (argue over) in the course of the play.
The narrative of the Skylight looms over everything in the play. When Tom’s wife Alice was dying, he installed her in a beautiful garden room with a skylight so she could enjoy the natural world in her remaining days. Tom speaks of the skylight as a token of his love, and yet, it is clear to the watcher (and to Kyra and Edward) that it was more of a symbol of guilt over his affair with Kyra, and that it represented a kind of beautiful cage for Alice.
This ElevenOne Theatre production is well worth a watch while it’s at Oxford’s Old Fire Station this week. It probably won’t put you in a romantic mood, but it will certainly get you thinking in an interesting way about past love and memory. ★★★★☆ @BookingAround 12th February 2020
