Grace here, still brushing the rain off me coat and popping down Kennington way, because there’s something quietly intriguing about what’s washing up at the White Bear Theatre this February. Learning How to Dive is one of those titles that sounds gentle until you realise it’s about grief, secrets and the sort of truths that surface when you least expect them, usually when you’re stood at the front door in your slippers wondering who on earth is knocking.
Written by WGGB award-winning writer Brendan Murray and directed by Willie Elliott, the play opens with a grieving widow, an angry son and a secret lover, which already feels like the start of a conversation nobody’s quite ready to have. What do you say when you open the door to a man you’ve never met before, especially when somehow you’ve known him for thirty years? Where do you even begin with that, and more importantly, where does it end? Add to that the unsettling discovery that the husband you were married to for fifty years wasn’t quite the man you thought he was, and suddenly the ground shifts under everyone’s feet.
Learning How to Dive takes a tender but clear-eyed look at the messy realities of love, lies, loss and sexuality, focusing on three people forced to confront what it really means to know someone, or perhaps to realise how much you never did. There’s nothing neat or comfortable promised here, and honestly that’s often where the most interesting theatre lives, in the awkward pauses and the things left unsaid.
It plays at the White Bear Theatre, tucked away at 138 Kennington Park Road, with press night on Wednesday 11 February at 7.30pm. It’s the sort of intimate space where a story like this can really sit with you, close enough to hear the breathing, close enough to feel the weight of what’s being shared.
The cast features Brendan Murray himself, alongside Darren Cheek and Karen Spicer, and it also marks Murray’s return to acting after nearly forty years, which feels quietly significant in itself. There’s something rather fitting about a play that asks how well we know people also being the moment a writer steps back on stage after so long away.
Produced by Damn Cheek Productions, this is a rare chance for London audiences to see a new play by a writer whose work has been produced internationally, and it sounds like one that isn’t interested in easy answers. I’ll be heading in with an open mind and curiosity.
For more information on the show please visit https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/learning-how-to-dive
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