A Day by the Sea at Southwark Playhouse was delightful

I did not go to see A Day by the Sea just because it was set in Dorset but that helped. The biggest draw was that the playwright, AC Hunter, was described by Southwark Playhouse as the English Chekhov.

The final draw was Southwark Playhouse itself. It's a cosy theatre in a convenient location that consistently presents interesting plays.

All that was enough to persuade me to part with £20 for Seat A7 in The Large.

That seat proved to be a little bit of an issue. The layout of the theatre changes for every performance, which is fine, and the booking system suggested that it was laid out this time in traditional theatre format. This was almost true but the stage was not across the whole width of the seating and in A7 all the stage was to the right of me. That was ok, if unexpected, for me but an issue for anyone in seats 1 to 6.

A Day by the Sea was basically just that, a group of family and friends spent a day by the sea somewhere in Dorset (Dorchester was mentioned). We also saw some of the day before and a little bit of the day after.

The Chekhov comparison was immediately obvious from the large cast of characters and that one was a doctor who drank a lot. The central character and, therefore, my star of the show was the elderly woman, played wonderfully by Susan Tracy, who owned the house. Staying with her were her frail older brother, her son on holiday from his diplomatic job in Paris, a woman she had taken in as a young orphan girl who was visiting with her two children. There was also the doctor, a solicitor and a maid.

As with Chekhov, all of the characters had their own stories and their own ambitions. The main thread was the son and the young woman renewing their connection to each other having grown up together at that house before parting twenty years previously. Those twenty years had not been kind to the woman who had been through two marriages and had been touched by scandal along the way. This led to the best line of the night, "When you've made a bad decision the last thing you need is good advice." She was talking about relationships but I was thinking about Brexit (and her relationships).

Because of that story line the other actor/actress who made a big impression on me was Alix Dunmore, the shamed woman. It helped that she wore some gorgeous outfits.

A Day by the Sea was a rich tapestry of characters and their stories, some dark, some trivial, some funny and all engaging. It made for a delightful evening.