Patience
Julia Hickman, Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Here’s a question – is your life perfect and about to be ruined, or ruined and about to be perfect, and can you ever tell the difference? The young Canadian playwright Jason Sherman has created a thoroughly absorbing story involving the ebb and flow of fortunes and relationships back and forth in time; it is very cleverly crafted and with energetic and focused direction by Adam Barnard keeps an air of anticipation throughout. Patience is the first of Sherman’s plays that have been put on in the UK – let’s hope there are many more to come.

Chaos theory is the theme that Sherman illustrates and explores by applying it to the precipitous ruination of one poor innocent chap’s nicely ordered life. Geoffrey Towers heads a fine cast as Reuben, the bewildered businessman whose life starts to fall apart after a bad-tempered game of squash. That same evening, his wife leaves him taking their two children, the following day his co-directors evict him from the company he founded, and then he learns that one of his brothers is dying.

OK, so he cheated a little at that squash game but surely he didn’t deserve those consequences? Chaos theory is the one where a butterfly flaps its wings in your back garden, the ripple effect of this moving air culminating in turbulence that makes an aeroplane crash into the side of a mountain. Therefore it is impossible to identify causes for anything that happens. This is what his physicist brother tries to drum into him.

But wait a minute, the action moves back 10 years, and there is Reuben kissing a woman who is not his wife. We recall that his wife found his old love letters, thus prompting their break-up and his ruination. Perhaps that kiss was in fact the butterfly’s wings. Now Reuben is again meeting up with the other woman – is a new order being created here?

 And so the previously complacent Reuben gets to do some proper thinking about what happened to him and what he really wants and needs out of life, his thoughts prompted by a host of other characters who skeeter in and out of his life, such as a rabbi, the ghost of a dead friend, and his brother’s new 19-year-old student girlfriend.

This is a stunning play incorporating some fascinating ideas, and although the play is fairly long, the time passes like a shot from a gun.

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