Static play made even more still

Moon Tiger, Lowry, Salford, to Saturday

Moon Tigers, for those who haven’t read Penelope Lively’s 1987 Booker prize-winning bestseller, are green, coiled tapers burned overnight, which release a scent that wards off mosquitoes.

This won’t help your understanding of anything much, save to say they provide a scent memory that helps the book’s heroine, Claudia, to remember her past.

Claudia, unfortunately, is dying in 1987 and the book recalls her adventurous life as a feisty child, war correspondent and single mother.

Jane Asher — still gorgeous at 67 — brings her richly to life as the book and Simon Reade’s adaptation scoot from place to place and across her life from age four to deathbed, jumping backwards and forwards in time.

The non-linear storytelling is beautifully done: initial scenes that seems to make no sense are gradually filled-in as earlier times and meetings are recalled.

Claudia’s main memories lie in her time as a correspondent in wartime Egypt, where she met Tom, the love of her life, tragically killed in action. The memories colour everything and make it clear that despite her apparently glorious time, she’s melancholy inside.

Jane Asher is pretty luminous throughout, and has no trouble playing herself as a girl or younger woman. It’s a staggeringly good story, a fact made clear in this adaptation, understatedly directed by Stephen Unwin.

But I’m not sure it’s a drama at all. The set is a simple hospital bed on one side, a few chairs and a large “window”, on to which are projected landscapes, film and stills to set each scene.

But apart from that the evening is rather static: there’s a lot of talk but almost no action, and though the play’s final curtain falls at around 9.40pm, you wouldn’t think it any shorter than most evenings at the theatre — there is so much narrative.

The supporting actors - Hilary Tones, Christopher Brandon, Philip Cumbus, Jade WIlliams and Tim Delap — play the other 16 characters and pretty much sit around on chairs waiting for each cue, making a static play even more still.

But it seems to me there are two better places to watch this: in a TV mini-series made at great expense with exotic locations and a cast of thousands, or in your head . . .