Until Saturday

NICHOLA McAuliffe’s opportune play, premiered at last August’s Edinburgh Festival in Jubilee year, is more than a clever plot to cash in on the royal celebrations.

It is a heart-warming and occasionally painful exploration of a long marriage and the illusions and delusions needed to preserve it.

The three-hander features the author, with Julian Glover in the title role and Sheila Reid as his slightly fey wife Helena. The excellent chemistry between the three actors glossed over one or two first-night memory lapses. 

Above all it is an absorbing story. Maurice, once a successful jeweller, and his wife are making the best of having fallen victim to financial disaster and he is now dying of cancer. Helena is in denial about his imminent demise, despite the patient  explanations of nurse Katy (McAuliffe).

The script includes some cracking jokes, many, one suspects, culled from Ms McAuliffe’s long residency in the medical comedy Surgical Spirit. 

Helena has had a marriage-long struggle to accommodate the other great love of Maurice’s life, the Queen. Glover holds the audience spellbound as he delivers a long monologue, telling Katy of his meeting with the young Queen on the eve of her Coronation, and of his certainty that Her Majesty will keep a promise to come to tea with him on her Diamond Jubilee and his 90th birthday.

Naturally both Katy and Helena are sceptical, but the prospect of that meeting is keeping Maurice alive so the women hatch a plan to preserve his illusion.

And there’s a twist in the tail.