A Breakfast of Eels, Print Room - theatre review

Robert Holman’s meandering style is an acquired taste, but in the end this is a compassionate and probing piece, says Henry Hitchings
Beautiful fragile lyricism: the play is full of perfectly aligned performances
Henry Hitchings8 April 2015

Robert Holman's plays are poignant, slow-burning and indirect. In A Breakfast of Eels he portrays the slippery bond between two men and offers tender musings about inheritance and codependency, inequality and influence.

Matthew Tennyson is Penrose, delicately bookish and only just out of his teens. Andrew Sheridan is Francis, more than a decade older and considerably tougher. They’re mourning the death of a man they both called “daddy”, and at first we assume they are brothers. Later we discover that they’re entangled by circumstance — Francis used to work as a gardener for Penrose’s family and has become his protector.

As they fathom their grief they move from Highgate, where Penrose has inherited a crumbling mansion, to Northumberland, where Francis revisits past traumas. Are they perhaps in love? The difficulty of articulating their feelings is certainly oppressive.

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1/50

Robert Hastie’s production moves with an admirable lack of hurry, allowing Holman’s dreamlike writing to breathe. At times the results have a beautifully fragile lyricism, and the performances are perfectly aligned. Holman’s meandering style is an acquired taste, but in the end this is a compassionate and probing piece.

Until April 11 (020 3642 6606, the-print-room.org)

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