Overview

The difficulties of love and marriage, through youth, menopause, and senility is the theme of this Thuna and Cauley play, which does not leave out the flashbacks of pubescence as Hannah, the girl who is asked to face all these problems is sometimes ten years old, sometimes forty-eight, and sometimes sixty-nine. At one stage she proposes to leave her husband, but her brother, Willie Farmer intervenes, and then comes the flashback to Hannah in her youth, and of love and the ideal of marriage being at high-tide, growing from birds and bees discovery to the third act, in which Hannah flashes forward to Neil, her husband, and his retirement. The sense of entrapment for both Neil and Hannah, and the infinite postponement of Hannah's leaving (and by the end of the play, it is Neil who is the restless one), looms inevitably and tragically in this mild, sometimes surprisingly stimulating comedy.