Despite its fortissimo declaration to the potency of music, Samuel Adamson’s sweeping new saga The Ballad of Hattie and James, is a discordant piece that doesn’t always strike the right note.
The Ballad of Hattie and James follows the journey of two teenage piano prodigies who meet in the mid-seventies to work on a student production of Benjamin Britten’s Noyes’ Fludde. Their life long relationship covers 70 years plus, and is shaped by a tragedy they share as teenagers.
In adulthood they meet only a handful of times almost as strangers, and are clearly still processing the fallout of their misadventure.
They are very different people. Hattie is a fiery, free spirited girl with a self-destructive streak who arrives at rehearsal with a bottle of vodka. While James is a stuttering, musical snob with absolutely no sense of humour.
Samuel Adamson’s script is a mixed bag that explores the complexities of prodigious musical talent, professional rivalry and platonic friendship. The witty, acerbic and often moving dialogue cleverly captures the naturalistic banter between two people who have known each other for eons.
However imposed upon this is a non-linear structure that tampers with the chronology and tempo of the piece to such an extent that it becomes wearing and a little perplexing. The Ballad of Hattie and James often focuses on how time tricks the memory, and ironically as an audience member it is easy to relate to this misremembering as the play progresses with all the repetitive, befogging time shifts.
Sometimes it feels all a bit pretentious and too clever for its own good. It felt like a very long night, and one wonders why the producers didn’t nudge the author towards some self-editing.
Once the big reveal is given (quite early in the play), about the cause of the lifelong schism between Hattie and James, neither the characters or the play’s cliched middle-class dilemmas are interesting enough to drag out the epic saga that Adamson indulges in.
The piece is rescued by the strong central performances of Sophie Thompson as Hattie and Charles Edwards as James, who convincingly capture both the dysfunctionality of their characters and their situation. Contemporary music includes the song Moving from Kate Bush which contains the lyric: “You crushed the lily in my soul” which succinctly sums up the emotional landscape of the two characters.
Throughout the actors are constantly sustained onstage by Berrak Dyer playing on the Bechstein piano which in its self essentially becomes a central character. Richard Twyman’s direction just about manages to hold the fragmented pieces of The Ballad of Hattie and James together.
