One Day When We Were Young. Hen & Chickens Theatre.

Nick Payne’s romantic two-handers usually feature a third character loitering in the background: the passage of time and the looming presence of death. That figure haunts the tessellated timelines of Constellations and his recent bittersweet film We Live in Time. His 2011 piece One Day When We Were Young — frequently revived and here directed with taut economy by Jonathan Reed — is a simpler, more linear creation. One misses the conceptual intricacies that lend Payne’s later works their flickering sense of possibility, and the 65-minute runtime leaves one wanting more. Yet that quiet presence is here too, rendered in muted, enigmatic tones, but unmistakably felt.

It is 1942 in a dim hotel room in Bath. Butcher’s boy Leonard (Micky Gibbons) and middle-class Violet (Emily Carmichael) are sharing a sleepless night before he is shipped off to an uncertain destiny in the war. The setting is plain, drab even, yet Payne fills it with the quiet intensity of parting and the melancholy of lives just beginning to form under the shadow of wartime bombing. “This isn’t actually going to be our last night, is it?” Leonard asks, seeking the kind of reassurance neither of the duo is equipped to give. The talk is of the future, of a house, money and a grand piano. “I will wait for you as long as you need me to,” Violet responds, but you know it is inevitable she will not.

Fast forward to the mid-1960s. Leonard, single and one supposes suffering from PTSD as a result of wartime imprisonment, engineers a meeting with the now happily married mother of two in a frozen park (the external environment here is always imbued with a looming threat). Putatively, he wants to invite Violet to his mother’s funeral, but really, he is in search of answers. “I would have waited,” he tells her, with restrained bitterness.  Fast forward again to the late 1990s. Leonard, lonely and nearly as dilapidated as the house he lives in, has invited Violet to visit. There is a settling of accounts of sorts.  “It’s not what I expected,” one of the characters says of life. It never is, which one supposes is Payne’s point here.

Gibbons’ bumbling, understated Leonard is constantly in awe of Violet and never quite finds the words to say how he feels. Carmichael’s younger Violet is vivacious and sparky. The passionate girl becomes something of a frump in her old age, complaining about her son-in-law and struggling with a mobile phone. The transition is beautifully judged. Shorn of much in the way of narrative, One Day When We Were Young sometimes feels more like a vignette than a fully formed drama. Still, it has an intimate emotional truth that makes it something of a gem, and Reed’s restrained production plays to the piece’s immense strengths.

Writer: Nick Payne

Director: Jonathan Reed