Gripping journey into the mind of a man who has lost it all
Michael Portillo, New Statesman, 17 January 2005

When was the moment when it all went wrong? If you could just put your finger on it, maybe somehow you could go back there and put things right. So muses Reuben, a successful businessman with a great job, wife and kids after he loses them all.

But then, argues his brother Phil, it is muddled thinking to search for causes and effects. Life is governed by the chaos theory, where small events can have enormous consequences that cannot be known in advance. We do not shape our destiny, but we can make choices. A disaster merely offers us the chance to begin again.

The possibility of returning to the fork in the road and choosing the way not taken before haunts Jason Sherman's Patience - literally. The spirit of a dead friend appears at Reuben's table in a Chinese restaurant. Paul, seemingly still living, tells him that he had always wanted to make films, and now he has given up everything to pursue his youthful ambition. He is working on a screenplay about a man who loses it all and discovers that he should never have had it in the first place. We have all we need, but do we need all we have? The film's hero becomes his true self and is happy.

Alas, while it may be easy for ghosts to talk about being happy or to write it into a film script, achieving contentment is more elusive. Even Phil, who abandons the family home for the wonders of sweaty sex with a 19-year-old neurotic student, misses the maturity of his wife's conversation. Reuben cannot find peace anywhere. He journeys back to take that other fork, finding the woman he should have been with a decade ago. But that was then and this is now. He succeeds in finding his true self, but it is loathsome and destructive. He fears that in any new relationship, he will recreate rather than escape his past.

Sherman's dialogue is authentic and highly entertaining. He keeps a firm grip on our attention for two and a half hours. That is not to say the play would not benefit from being shorter. There is a good deal of repetition and more than a hint of heavy-handedness. It begins to feel as though Sherman assumes his audience to be stupid.

Patience performs unannounced time shifts, and they work well. The actors made minimal changes to their appearance to indicate that we had jumped back ten years to a fateful party. If there was a moment when it all came un-stuck, the same mo-ment when our characters should have wrenched themselves away from their routines and embraced uncertainty, it was then. The play also lurches in and out of fantasy, and that is another of its successes. Reuben complains that he is living with a hotel full of uninvited guests in his mind, and we are drawn with him into delusions that are hard to distinguish from reality.

Reuben is a curious and well-observed villain. He is full of bonhomie. He likes a game of squash, a meal and a drink. He regards himself as perfectly happy. He never utters a hostile word. But evidently he is without feeling. He has no idea that throughout his marriage he has been crushing his wife. Such is his selfish obsession that he sucks the life out of any room full of people, requiring it all for himself. It has never occurred to him that his work colleagues hate him. Reuben is inert. He takes few initiatives: things just happen to him. So the vituperation heaped on him by his wife and his associates bemuses him.

Geoffrey Towers handles those complexities well. His Reuben seems likeable enough to us, and tells a good joke. We see two women fall for him. Yet we do not for a moment doubt that his passivity makes him detestable. He wins our sympathy because, by the end, he cannot escape his own flaws. He is cleverer than Phil, and half-baked philosophising about uncertainty principles offers him no hiding place from self-awareness.

Six actors cover a dozen roles and they are all good. Chris Andrew Mellon is excellent as both Reuben's aggressive workmate and the dreamy Phil.

Patience deserves a bigger audience than can be fitted into the Finborough Theatre. They pack them in there, and with the heat of the lights, we were all treated to a free sauna that left us grateful that we had come in January not July. The director, Adam Barnard, and designer, Vicki Fifield, fit the action well into a clever set, which hints in turns at a squash court, shower room, restaurant and car interior.

The Canadian writer, Jason Sherman, is well established in his home country, and Patience won the Chalmers Award for Canadian Plays. Its performance in London marks Sherman's UK debut. We should wholeheartedly look forward to the play's graduation to the West End, and to seeing more of his witty and thoughtful material. But maybe he could trust us to absorb his ideas without the need for a sledgehammer.

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