Review: 4000 Miles – precisely the reason Chichester’s Minerva Theatre is there​​​​​​​

Richard Eyre’s production of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles is precisely the reason the Minerva is there – the kind of play you know virtually nothing about beforehand but which turns out to be an absolute gem, warm, wise and rather wonderful. Not a lot happens, but it doesn’t need to. There is poignancy and profundity on a terrific opening night in this year’s Minerva programme.

It helps, of course, that the piece is so beautifully acted – but also that it is so beautifully designed. Peter McKintosh’s set is tremendous, so rich and detailed. With a huge back wall of higgledy-piggledy books and piles of vinyl on the floor, you walk straight into a living, breathing New York apartment, instantly somewhere you feel you want to be. It draws you in immediately, priming you perfectly for the gentle interplay of the characters that soon inhabit it, primarily 91-year-old Vera, living independently despite the challenges of her advancing years, and her 21-year-old grandson Leo who arrives without warning at the end of the 4,000 miles of the title.

On her first return to Chichester in more than 30 years, Eileen Atkins, who will turn 89 not long after the run ends, gives a remarkable performance as the grandmother, but she is matched every step of the way by Sebastian Croft, more than pensionable age her junior, as her grandson. It is the connection that the two characters find between them which makes this piece so special, but it is there because the actors have it.

It's not a play about this happened and then that happened. It’s a piece which slowly, very slowly, reveals the situation that we start with as we get to know Vera and Leo, just as they get to know each other. The differences between them, quite apart from the obvious ones, are huge, yet something draws them together.

Vera is still mourning the drunken, unfaithful husband she loved, just as she is mourning her memory, her ability to find the right words and her ability to find just about everything. Leo’s is a very different tragedy, which is suggested and hinted at long before we get the full story in the play’s most moving scene – a scene swiftly followed by its funniest line. There is pain, but there is also humour in this piece about how we cope with tragedy and how we move on.

Atkins gives us the wit, the timing and the nuance in a beautiful performance. Croft (read interview here) has equal presence on stage, equal skill. The understanding between them is the kind of thing we go to the theatre to see. In fact, you can’t help wondering whether the play would have worked as just a two-hander. Possibly, it might have been even better.

But that’s to take nothing away from Nell Barlow and Elizabeth Chu as respectively girlfriend and would-be one-night stand. How tough must it be to wait and then walk into a piece already so absorbing but both add to it significantly and adeptly. It is acting of the highest order throughout in a piece that touches you and holds you – and that will linger long in memory.

Running straight through without an interval, it stops quite suddenly. But then again, that’s exactly the point: it leaves you thinking that it could easily have been continued. Which is precisely what the characters have done. Sad and awful things have happened, but they have carried on.