FringeReview UK 2026

45 Years

Chichester Festival Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Chichester Festival Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“It wasn’t a loud scream. It was more like an outpouring of air, from her lungs.” Husband Geoff is describing the last moments of his girlfriend in 1973, to his wife Kate, about to celebrate 45 years of marriage. Now Katya’s even longer-frozen body has been discovered; and that frozen breath exhales its warming monoxide over them. Hannah Patterson’s adaptation of Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed 2015 film 45 Years is itself based on a 2001 story ‘In Another Country’ by the distinguished poet and translator David Constantine; also renowned for his short stories. Featuring Gabriel Byrne (as Geoff), Geraldine James (Kate) and Gillian Bevan (Lena), it plays at Chichester Festival Theatre Minerva directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah till July 11.

That the Constantine story has been doubly distilled over at least 25 years is both part of the permafrost and problem. Indeed the soft-voiced Byrne almost seems to inhabit the unspoken and the almost-said as if in a film; and to begin with, isn’t clear. I attuned to this, though others didn’t. His depiction of pained withdrawal seems in place from the start; though his nuanced hesitations compel. Byrne smoulders a tetchiness you fear might light up with his newly-relapsed smoking.

James and Bevan though are as sovereign and cut-through as you’d wish on the Minerva stage. James is quietly pained, glints hurt and a steely probing, is exuberant in her dancing (Geoff wilts by comparison), funny with Bevan’s Lena (a part James played in the film, paradoxically), and briefly overwhelmed. And once, a playful solace after love-making.

Bevan’s appearances are effervescent, an outdoor summer breeze. You mourn the end of another exchange with James, with Bevan’s extroverted warm prods as Lena attempts to breathe joy into the hesitant Kate. Lena you feel is one of those off-kilter friends of circumstance who end up being what Kate, at least, might need. Later on Bevan nuances Lena’s suddenly being wrong-footed: a literally revealing scene, presenting Kate with a gift. Bevan hardly interacts with Byrne. You almost wish Bevan’s offstage husband might complicate dynamics more, but that’s not the story. The vocal imbalance isn’t helped by the lack of any voice coach. It’s a curious chemistry, but in 80 minutes you don’t nod.

About to celebrate that 45^th with Kate (a 40^th had to be postponed), and a works reunion, Geoff receives a letter informing him that after over 50 years his former partner’s body has been discovered in a Swiss fissure. There’s several things he’s never revealed to Kate. And several she has to discover for herself. It’s not only Geoff’s unspoken past that’s withheld, though Kate too feels as she tells Geoff: “I would like to tell you everything I’m thinking. And everything I know. But I can’t. Do you understand?”

Well dramatically no, we don’t. It would make more satisfying theatre if Kate did speak out, but that’s not what the story addresses. It’s how Kate deals with Geoff’s feelings and her assertion “I probably was enough for you” is wielded with a caveat. It’d not just the famous line: “If she hadn’t died… would you have married her for real?” Events in their own marriage are now shadowed by the bright terror of a young woman frozen in 1973. Kate even asks the colour of Katya’s hair.

Haigh made of Constantine’s story what some have made of William Trevor’s equally poetic stories: a fine film. Its trickle of dramatic force needs careful handling. What Patterson – mainly a film-script-writer herself – has developed, is a further visual evocation; in some ways akin to a carefully-crafted Trevor TV film. It’s glimpsed occasionally in long Shavian stage-directions; particularly a revelation in the attic, which continues for a couple of pages.

Nevertheless Patterson herself misses cues: Geoff’s yet again attempting a book Kate says the couple have three copies of but never got past chapter 2. Patterson doesn’t have Geoff say it’s Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, but it’s indicated in the directions. Not only a choice of Katya/Kate, but in a wilderness of character-points an intellectual hinterland is lost. And perhaps a Pythonesque joke. The point of the exchange is lost too.

If you skim the revealing script (which reads well, with an ending not quite evident in performance), you appreciate Puwanarajah is clearing Patterson’s script – and its nuances of Haigh and Constantine – for the stage. It’s both necessary and overly drastic. Puwanarajah’s vision is complemented in James Cotterill’s minimal blue-grey set. It’s a frozen affair with two chairs and a cabinet, themselves spirited away; and with an occasional loft gestured in a discreet overhead construction. It’s echoed by the stage-floor cavity representing the loft when ascended.

The music of Beth Duke’s sound design shifts from 1960s (not early 70s) hits such as “I Only Want to Be with You” and “Everlasting Love” through a curious classical piano middle (Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, Field Nocturne No. 5, a Scarlatti Sonata) through to the anniversary-chosen “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”. With the classical soundscape, there’s narrative layers here not rendered audible. Duke’s naturally-sourced soundscape though – a glacier creaking menace in climate-change, a theme touched on by Geoff – hints a larger story: past tragedy meets present desolation and future catastrophe.

Days projected onto the upstage wall flicker with each (very frequent) black-out in Guy Hoare’s lighting. Neil McDowell Smith’s colour and (mainly) black-and-white photos of mountainside and those from the past serve as a narrative punctuation. Natasha Harrison’s movement direction does as much as possible with such a prescriptive set: actors make use of exits and apparate miraculously from another side in seconds.

All that said, the dialogue still often preserves the poetic turn of phrase in Constantine’s story, with its reference to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta:  “Fornication./but that was in another country./And besides, the wench is dead.”

This is a fascinating story too; unique in particulars yet universal. How does the past suddenly alter the present, but also reveal chasms in the present a sheer drop from that past inverts? The essentials are there, and the work, never overlong, is mostly superbly acted. Puwanarajah’s – in some places – partial realisation of Patterson’s rich script is understandable. Patterson doesn’t always gift the director easy choices in translating a charged or revealing moment into theatre.

It’s not often done to quote poetry. But David Constantine’s brief title poem from his 1980 collection A Brightness to Cast Shadows itself casts his own lyric concentration on a story that has haunted him long:

And now among them these dark mornings yours

Ascendant and of a brightness to cast shadows.

Love the winter, fear

The earlier and earlier coming of the light

When in the mantle blue we turn our dead faces.

Such revelations are delicate but devastating, and this team work to realise the near-imposssible. Acting and often dialogue still compel in long bursts, though pace is unvarying. And as Byrne exudes Geoff’s haplessness, with Bevan generating a baffled warmth, James rises in Kate’s new-found realisation with an almost invisible bleak semaphore in her gestures. It sets a seal on one of the swiftest slow-burn productions I’ve seen.

Casting Director Matilda James CDG, Assistant Director Joanna Pidcock.

Production Manager Cath Bates, Costume Supervisor Sian Harris, Props Supervisor Fahmida Bakht.

Company Stage Manager Cat Buffrey, DSM Sylvia Darkwa-Ohemeng, ASM Beth Riley.

Published June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 by Simon Jenner