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Review: 45 Years (Minerva, Chichester Festival Theatre)

Review by Hywel Farrow-Wilton

 

⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

The 2026 season at the Chichester Festival Theatre has been one of variety and generally decent quality, as you would expect from one of the country’s best regional producing theatres. Their latest offering, 45 Years, is another adaptation following on from Atonement, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, and whilst it has all the hallmarks of a decent thriller, it fails to create much dramatic tension or interest. The play is equipped with a star cast and interesting material, but frustratingly never reaches its full potential and left me feeling like I just watched a distinctly average play.

 


The show is based on the 2015 film of the same name by Andrew Haigh, which itself is based on David Constantine’s short story In Another Country. The film starred Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, with Rampling being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The play centres around a couple in their sixties named Geoff and Kate, as they plan their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Geoff suddenly receives a letter one morning from the Swiss authorities informing him that they have finally found the body of his former girlfriend, Katya, who had died during a mountaineering holiday in the early nineteen sixties. Secrets are revealed, and old traumas are revived as Kate learns that there was more to Geoff and Katya’s relationship than she had known, which causes her to re-evaluate her own relationship with Geoff as she comes to terms with the new context of their marriage.

 

The play is adapted from the film by award-winning writer Hannah Patterson, whose writing is mostly interesting enough for the eighty-minute runtime, but lacks drama and sufficient interrogation of the play’s themes of memory, love and forgiveness to provoke any emotional movement. The play struggles to maintain pacing throughout the show, and as such it trudges along at a weary speed until it reaches one of the few moments of genuine tension, only to peter out and resume dragging its heels through the plot. The upside to this is that the audience gets to know Geoff and Kate’s relationship very intimately, and it could be argued that the slow pace is reflective of the state of their marriage and their lives as sixty-something retirees. The core structure does remind me of the fantastic Duncan Macmillan play Lungs, with the constant back and forth between a couple that have been together for a while, but 45 Years lacks the speed and close tension between the two main actors that made Lungs such a modern classic.


 

Director Prasanna Puwanarajah has managed to find and highlight a few good moments of drama, such as Kate’s investigation of the attic and Geoff’s final speech at their anniversary, but these few moments of theatrical flair were short breaths of fresh air when compared to the rest of the play. His direction of the central couple was sometimes fun, and they were very believable as an old married couple, but the gaps between them on the stage hindered their connection, and whilst on the one hand this works with the plot of the show, it felt like there could have been more closeness to juxtapose the gap between them which would have shown a more complex level to their relationship.

 

Designer James Cotterill’s set is a highlight of the show. His bare stage gives lots of space for the actors to play in and for the words to take centre stage as the focus of the play is between the central couple. The ceiling he designed made the sitting room setting feel very claustrophobic, and also serves as a physical manifestation of the pressure that the memory of Katya is having on their relationship. It moves seamlessly into short scenes in the attic and the anniversary with the assistance of lighting changes, but it was the constant dripping of water off the top of the ceiling at the back of the stage that caught my eye. It was just a small, constant dripping throughout the play, only sometimes audible during transitions, but it served as a nice, abstract reminder of the ‘cracks’ in their marriage.


 

The cast is made up of  onlythree actors playing Geoff, Kate and their friend Lena, who pops up a couple of times throughout the show. The three actors gel well together, and it’s nice to see a cast of exclusively ‘older’ talent represented onstage. Geraldine James played Kate and, interestingly, had played Lena in the original film. She returns to the story in this new role and plays Kate perfectly satisfactorily. She has a few moments of comedy where her characterisation leans into exacerbated wife, but mostly serves as the character through whom the audience witnesses the plot. She finds nuance when having scenes with Geoff, especially during the final anniversary scene, and also plays the part of the suspicious wife well when discovering the mystery surrounding Katya.

 

Gabriel Byrne is probably the best-known actor amongst the trio, having won a Golden Globe award for his role as Paul Weston in the HBO drama series In Treatment. In 45 Years, however, he sometimes felt a little out of his depth and under-rehearsed as he accidentally said a few of his lines too early, managing to recover each time, but subsequently taking the audience out of the moment. He is often amusing when he plays into the ‘old dad’ stereotype, and has a few decent dad jokes that had the audience chuckling. His final speech at the anniversary was nicely delivered, but his performance overall felt a bit lacklustre.

 


Gillian Bevan, as the couple’s friend Lena, is a welcome break whenever she is onstage. She plays the role very well, portraying a sympathetic and kind friend to Kate, and her presence provides some interest when compared to the long scenes between Kate and Geoff.

 

Overall, the play is an interesting examination of the development of a long-term relationship and how they change as people grow older, but it would have benefited from some better pacing and tighter performances. As I mentioned earlier, this play is quite reminiscent of Lungs, and indeed Constellations by Nick Payne, and I think that fans of that particular form of writing will find more to enjoy in 45 Years, but for people expecting a pacey, mysterious thriller, you may be leaving the theatre a bit disappointed.

 

45 Years plays at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester until 11th July 2026.

 

 

Photos by Helen Murray

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