Salt-Water Moon review

With a bittersweet tone and an often achingly slow pace, this is a lyrical love story from celebrated Canadian playwright David French. It’s just one instalment in a sprawling play-cycle, loosely based on French’s personal history, chronicling the exploits of several generations of the fictional Mercer family. It premiered in Toronto in 1984; this production, directed by Peter Kavanagh, is the first to reach the UK.

Set in Newfoundland during the summer of 1926, it centres on a single, poignant conversation between teenage bride-to-be Mary and her former sweetheart Jacob. Mary is poised to enter into a loveless marriage; Jacob, just back from Toronto, is dead set on dissuading her. As they tentatively attempt to heal the wounds left by their separation a year earlier, they discuss just about everything except their love for one another, making oblique pronouncements about the colours of stars or the Canadian regiments that fought in the First World War.

French’s dialogue feels stiff at times, yet his characters are intriguingly nuanced, and the fragmented anecdotes they tell gradually coalesce into an absorbing meditation on poverty, class and the grim legacies of war. Kavanagh chooses not to rush the opening passages, allowing the intentionally abstruse conversation to wash over the audience like lazy waves lapping the Atlantic provinces’ shore.

Breathing life into the tight-laced script, performers Bryony Miller and Joseph Potter build up some cracking tension, flirting, rebuffing, taunting and consoling each other in an intricate interplay of shifting emotions. Potter’s Jacob is a swaggering charmer stuffed into a scruffy suit, all ruffled charisma and unpredictable outbursts. But there’s a brittle quality to his bluster, and a desperate need to set things right.

Beside him, Miller brings convincing depth to Mary, a character who could easily be played as simply naive. Though she’s been stifled by a strict upbringing and a lack of formal education, Miller’s Mary is quick-witted, strong-willed and more than a match for Jacob, playing along with his games but repeatedly reminding him of the sad realities behind his romanticised notions.

Mim Houghton’s intelligent set design creates an impressive sense of wide open, moonlit space. A bright, white-painted iron bench sits on a strand of dark woodchips, surrounded by the expanse of a starry night sky, in which suspended globes delicately glow. A soft soundscape of ambient noise helps ground the play in its coastal setting, underlining the rhythmic dialogue with a steady throb of the sea, whistling wind and the sombre drone of distant boats sounding their foghorns.