Boa

How much would you pay to watch a middle-aged couple deconstruct their 30-year marriage for 85 minutes on what amounts to a tiny space in the semi-darkness? If one half of the couple involves the actress Dame Harriet Walter then the answer is probably a reasonable amount. The conceit is simple. Belinda, nicknamed Boa (Walter), is a wiry, still-beautiful, bendy ex-ballerina with a fire in her belly that she regularly douses with vats of red wine. There are very few women who can be both bendy and brainy and Harriet Walter is one of them (I’m not sure who the others are).

He, Louis (Guy Paul), is equally wiry, more circumspect, less frenetic, an American war reporter who won the Pulitzer at 26 (he wasn’t going to be a bus driver was he?). The set is minimal: a backdrop of brick and plaster with a radio and a couple of upturned crates for comfort. So far, so student production. But Boa is that rare thing, a tense twohander written by the supremely talented Clara Brennan, which manages to be both dialogueheavy and nimble on its feet.

The play opens before it opens – the audience take their seats to an ever-ready Walter on stage going through her warm-up routine in the kind of skinhugging light-jersey ensemble that only those who have spent a lifetime avoiding chips can get away with. Her wide-legged trousers are to die for – although obviously that’s not the point.

The lights dim and the spartan space becomes a backstage dressing room in an off-Broadway theatre. A corner of the world where the two lovers have spent much of their lives. For Guy Paul, this is familiar territory – his CV is a tribute to a career making the kind of fringe theatre known as ‘keeping it real’. In real life – and here is the nugget of the play’s interest – Paul and Walter are a couple. Two 60-somethings who persuade us into believing their well-trodden tales of tenderness and tragedy. Pathos and personal revelation and a tear-jerking ending.

Yet the reality is that this advert for the baby-boomer generation only met in 2009 when Walter appeared in Mary Stuart in New York. The marriage was a first for both, and, given the palpable energy on stage, their last.

The publicity posters feature a snake draped around the couple’s sinewy necks but ophidiophobes fear not – it’s simply an over-laden device used to flag up her nickname, Boa: ‘Sometimes her arm around your shoulders felt like a feather boa, and sometimes it felt like a big old snake squeezing the life out of you. I liked it.’ He should be so lucky.

Until 7 March at Trafalgar Studios, 14 Whitehall, London SW1: 0845-505 8500, www.trafalgarstudios.co.uk