Thwarted love between geriatrics

This is brilliant. The new play by Oliver Cotton, a 69-year-old actor, is set in New York in 1986. An ageing couple, Joe and Ellie, are practising their ballroom dancing when Joe’s maverick brother Billy comes crashing through the front door. The cops are after him. He was holed up in a Florida hotel when he spotted the Nazi brute who tortured them all at a death-camp during the war. He shot the bastard dead and left him floating in a swimming pool in front of hundreds of gawping witnesses. Then he ran for it. He’s not even sorry. He’s pleased he did it.

This is gripping stuff. What next? A hundred options blaze through the mind, not least the possibility that Billy has mistakenly slotted an innocent lookalike. But Cotton fails to elaborate on his marvellous opening. He throws in a couple of surprises in the second half but these twists have no bearing on the main story: a bullet-ridden Nazi in a Florida pool and a manhunt closing in on Billy and his bewildered in-laws. Billy doesn’t even get to hide under the floorboards. What a disappointment. Having dodged its thrilling moral complexities, the script turns into a big fat slice of sugary nostalgia about thwarted love between geriatrics.

The production, in the compact new Park Theatre, is serviceable enough but a few holes appear in the fabric. Notably with the accents. Billy, Joe and Ellie are Austrian Jews who lived in Linz until early adulthood and later became American citizens, so their speech patterns should be delicate, many-layered structures that carry the traces of Teutonic, Hebrew and Atlantic-English influences. But not here. They all sound like Popeye. Only Maureen Lipman (Ellie) adds some Germanic flavourings to her speech.