45 Years Review – Gabriel Byrne and Geraldine James celebrate an anniversary for the ages | stage

THis story spans a week in the life of a couple approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. While Kate (Geraldine James) manages the preparations, Jeff (Gabriel Byrne) receives a message about his ex-girlfriend who died while falling into a crevasse in the Swiss Alps more than 50 years ago. Katya’s body was found preserved in ice. “It’s still there,” he says, and this frozen piece of his past threatens to cast the Norfolk village couple’s life together in a different, perhaps lower, light.

David Constantine’s short story-turned-film is a quiet and sensitive thing. Much of her emotion occurs in unspoken moments and silent revelations. What a difficult process it has been to transfer this to the stage, so it’s admirable that Hannah Patterson has adapted to such spare and evocative economy.

It’s fun to see Byrne on stage as well, even when he’s stuttering or pausing on his lines. It makes Jeff angrier and more intense than Tom Courtenay from Andrew Haigh’s 2015 film. James gives a more contained, questioning performance as Kate, but there’s resonance, not least because she played Kate’s friend Lena in the film. Here, in Gillian Bevan’s hands, she’s more of an annoying sitcom girlfriend than James’s bossy Lena.

Director Prasanna Puwanarajah gives this simple and domestic story a theatrical flair. It is shown in a living room with one wardrobe and two chairs, but it becomes more symbolic and surreal, subtly shifting to the loft where Jeff has hidden memories and photographs of Katya.

There are short scenes from throughout the week, strung together with blackouts and blasts of music, like a middle-aged version of Zodiac. Beth Duke’s sound design carries a lot of emotional drama with songs from this couple’s past, for fond memories; Most painful is the sound of the strong, lonely wind that conjures the Alps on which Katja perished but also the increasing desolation and danger that Kate feels in her marriage.

It is a beautiful piece of theater with a gem-like delicacy. It doesn’t quite develop in its emotional devastation but it intrigues and makes you think about the passing of youth, the secrets and illusions of a long marriage but also the love that is here, real and solid, versus the memory of a previous (older?) love that remains forever young, forever dead.