He wasn’t a good person but he was my friend
It is a line that hangs over In Our Broken Hours long after the lights come up. In a single sentence, Alex Viveash’s play captures the contradiction at its heart: how do you mourn someone who hurt you? How do you separate the damage they caused from the affection that survives them?
Viveash’s two-hander follows a daughter and her alcoholic father as they navigate years of accumulated disappointment, resentment and love. What emerges is not simply a play about addiction but a study of the stories families tell themselves in order to keep going. The writing is at its strongest when it trusts complexity. One of the evening’s most memorable moments arrives when the daughter describes her father with the observation, “And sometimes he’s sober.”
Simon Ashton gives a finely judged performance as the father. He avoids turning the character into either a villain or a victim. There is selfishness, certainly, but there is also warmth, humour and vulnerability. His repeated renditions of “That’s Life” become increasingly poignant as the play unfolds. Sung more than once throughout the evening, the song takes on a different meaning each time, shifting from bravado to something closer to self-persuasion.
Opposite him, Giulia Rose brings remarkable depth to the daughter. She captures the exhausting reality of caring for someone who repeatedly lets you down without ever losing sight of why that person matters. Rose never asks the audience for sympathy. Instead, she allows us to witness the constant negotiation between anger and loyalty that defines the relationship.
One of the play’s most uncomfortable exchanges comes when the father tells his daughter that he only began drinking after she was born. The statement lands like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything that follows. Whether intended as explanation, accusation or misplaced honesty, Viveash wisely leaves the audience to wrestle with its implications.
The production is deceptively simple. The set remains unchanged throughout, creating the impression that both characters are trapped within the same emotional landscape no matter how much time passes. Under Viveash’s direction, there is little interest in theatrical embellishment. The focus remains firmly on the relationship, allowing the performances and the writing to carry the evening.
By the time the final phone call arrives, the audience understands that this story is not building towards reconciliation. There is no grand reckoning waiting around the corner. Instead, the scene draws its power from its ordinariness. Conversations end. Calls are hung up. Life moves on until suddenly it cannot. The knowledge that this will be their last exchange gives the moment a quiet, devastating force.
In Our Broken Hours never attempts to excuse addiction, nor does it reduce a life to its worst decisions. Instead, it examines what remains after the arguments have finished and the opportunities for change have passed. What survives is memory: fragmented, contradictory and deeply human. Viveash’s play understands that grief is rarely about losing perfect people. More often, it is about learning how to live with all the versions of someone that continue to exist after they are gone.