REVIEW: A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP by Tim Marriott and Jeff Stoltzer at Theatre at the Tabard until 22 March 2025

‘likeable, amiable cross-cultural, cross-class comedy’ ★★★

“And what am I supposed to do while he’s talking?” the grande olde Dame Edith Evans is meant to have asked a hapless director during a lengthy soliloquy by her co-star. It’s a good question for playwrights and actors alike, and writers Tim Marriott and Jeff Stoltzer answer it here by having their two protagonists in a likeable, amiable cross-cultural, cross-class comedy build a gazebo in the garden over our hour in their company.

Monty (Colonel Toft to those not on first-name terms), played by co-writer Tim Marriott, is a traditional Englishman, army to his stiff upper lip, well-off but out of cash and out of time in a modern world of influencers and hugging.

His daughter will shortly marry the son of brash American plumber Pete (Brian Dykstra), and the pair of them, having only just met, must bond over the building of this gazebo while their wives and offspring are off at a rehearsal from which they are mercifully superfluous.

A comedy of manners results, built on obvious but thoroughly enjoyable misunderstandings of language, physicality and cultural norms. With clean-shaven Marriot in jumper, check shirt, cords and brogues, and bearded Dykstra in baseball cap, louder check shirt, t-shirt and leisure pants, the visual difference between the two men is instantly established. Water closet, johns, lavatories and loos demonstrate two cultures divided by a common language. What passes for coffee for the English upper-middle classes and the liquid an American will allow across his oesophagus amusingly lay bare more of the things that divide us.

Yet the two men are about to share a life – as in-laws. And across an agreeable 60 minutes, their points of similarity, even comradeship, will begin to emerge. The Colonel’s careful planning of the construction work takes longer than the American’s practical action, but up the tent goes to their mutual satisfaction.

There’s a warmth between the two actors that makes this work, Marriott’s initial stiffness softening as he realises that there’s more to this change to his traditional ways than he’d thought, Dykstra’s kindness and amusement at the ramrod-backed Englishman moving into genuine concern for the Colonel’s worries about his daughter, paying from his straitened resources for the wedding (as a ‘traditional’ father of the bride must) and his health.

It’s satisfyingly structured as they become closer and forge what might turn into a friendship. A little more depth in exploring their wider world might raise the show beyond agreeable comedy (some sense, for example, of what the son and daughter they’re about to see marry are like, and some indication of their lives with their wives). But, as an hour-long comedy exploring UK-US differences without going topically and pointlessly into Trump-land catastrophising, it hits its targets and works very well and very enjoyably. When plumber Jeff finally gets Colonel Monty to consent to a hug (though let’s not overdo it, old chap), the good have ended happily and a contented audience can hit the bar.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP by Tim Marriott and Jeff Stoltzer, directed by Margarett Perry at Theatre at the Tabard until 22 March 2025

Box Office: https://tabard.org.uk/whats-on/a-special-relationship/

Reviewer David Weir

David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.