Suspension - Bristol Old Vic

If Suspension were a food product, it would be under investigation by Environmental Health. What appears to be a light fluffy confection - perfectly edible, but certainly not Tesco Finest - conceals within it a splinter of glass which leaves an unsuspecting consumer ripped and bleeding. Catherine Johnston’s play about two fathers who, through a bizarre confluence of circumstances, end up handcuffed together on top of the Clifton Suspension Bridge is light and funny in a fairly conventional way - and then it suddenly isn’t.

Suspension is not a particularly subtle piece. It is unsubtle in a lot of its comedy, unsubtle in the build to its (highly effective and unrevealable) twist, and unsubtle in the copious dollops of local colour that saturate the play. Not content with setting the story on the city's iconic landmark, Johnson lards the dialogue with Bristol references and speech mannerisms to the point where, at times, even the most chauvinistic Bristolian cries “Enough”. As an aside, this was the one critique that one could also make of Up the Feeder Down the Mouth Again, another celebration of the city which was also directed by Suspension’s director Heather Williams.

Yet this is a very pleasantly constructed piece which is performed with style and confidence. The core performance comes from James Lailey as Gerry, the estranged father desperately trying to reach his daughter on her wedding day. He combines a pitch-perfect Bristolian with a highly refined comic timing. Some of the other performances lack a certain amount of finesse, but since Suspension is not the most understated of plays anyway, this is less of a problem. What is more grating, however, is the fact that some of the cast struggle with the local accent (odd, since they are virtually all either Bristol born and bred or long-term residents of the city). If you’re going to do a play about Bristol in Bristol, you can be sure that audiences will notice if any of your characters sound like the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny. It might, in some cases, have been better to have acknowledged that Bristol has more than its fair share of blown-in residents and a diversity of accents across the city, and allowed the actors to speak in a way that came more naturally to them.

But this is a minor niggle, a counsel of perfection. Beyond itself, Suspension is a fine symbol of where the reborn Old Vic’s focus will hopefully lie: Bristol theatre for Bristolians, not high-class, high-budget productions which strip-mine local resources in order to please London critics and offer little or nothing to the local community. Let’s hope that we are returning to the Bristol Old Vic