'The Moon is Halfway To Heaven' at Jermyn Street Theatre, 3/5

Dubbed ‘the jewel in the basement,’ the modest Jermyn Street Theatre hides innocuously amid the bustle and glitz of London’s West End. Its latest production, David Kerby-Kendall’s ‘The Moon is Halfway to Heaven,’ suits the cosy layout: its small central stage surrounded by tightly packed seating reminiscent of a miniature padded amphitheatre. Consequently, the audience feels like an unwanted intruder overhearing the intimate confessions driving this poignant story of life, death and friendship.

Paul (also played by Kerby-Kendall) and Jamie (Lucas Hare) are best friends who, seeking temporary respite from reality, return throughout their lives to their special place – a secluded park bench and tree. The play uses this single location to trace their unorthodox relationship, bearing witness to various contemplations on their lives from ages seven to eighty-nine.

These intimate encounters are constantly overlooked by a Mighty Boosh-style moon that becomes a symbol of childhood and mortality. It also serves the purpose of scene setting, playing topical clips from the interchanging time periods. A large screen also sits behind the stage allowing limitless backdrops that project childhood fantasies and reveal the personal, imaginative escapism of the characters.

Born after the First World War Paul and Jamie’s early lives demonstrate the happy innocence of public school Englishness – mispronouncing words, confusing ideas, and wondering how adults manage to know everything. Obvious schoolboy gaffs and mostly unimaginative jokes are buoyed by the energy and gusto with which the actors throw themselves into their childhood roles.

Their teenage years brings inevitable sexual awakening; the discovery of girls and masturbating. Ladies man Jamie is the foil to intellectual but socially incapable Paul, even teaching him how to kiss. An admirably truthful portrayal of adolescent angst gradually escalates into over-indulged laddish humour. This get drunk, male-focused comedy continues throughout their adult lives. Whilst intending to reveal their ‘young at heart’ attitude, it begins to seem rather repetitive and overdone.

War, marriage and divorce invade their experiences whilst their central friendship maintains the one loving and supportive constant. As the characters grow old reluctantly, their nostalgia for the pure imagination of childhood intensifies. They offer metaphysical and spiritual reflections on life and identity– ‘the billion things that make us who we are.’ The characters realise the tragic transience of life and perception. These insights are thought-provoking although often cross over into tedious and didactic monologues of the writer’s personal philosophies.

Where the play succeeds is in its sense of fun and the heartfelt sympathy with which the audience identifies with the relationship described in the program as ‘without a label;’ a relationship outside society’s preconceptions. What undoes this slightly is that their loutish heterocentricism underpinned by homoeroticism is the definition of conventional masculinity. What could have potentially been an interesting theme of repressed homosexuality is immediately rejected as one of those ‘labels.’

From a production that resolves in the program to confront the conventions of society, it seems to conform to many itself. The dialogue though genuinely funny and moving at times, often seems unoriginal and cheesy. Jamie’s eventual death in old age sets up a final scene that could have been from a Hollywood chick flick –Paul gazing up at the moon as a pop ballad blasts in the background.