Trestle at Southwark Playhouse Little house is the world premiere of Stewart Pringle's 2017 Papatango new writing prize and it is easy to see why he won the award .His writing has a tender gentle charm , at times almost Pinteresque with its pauses and unsaid reflections, as it explores the developing relationship between Harry and Denise, both said to be in their sixties in a village hall in Yorkshire . It promises to ask how we choose to live in the face of soaring life expectancies and does so through twenty one episodic scenes.
It becomes a sort of Groundhog Day experience as each of the first twenty scenes explores the relationship at the weekly changeover of the Billingham Improvement Committee which Harry chairs and the middle aged Zumba class which Denise leads. We never meet the rest of committee or the class attendees and therefore the action is restricted to the five minutes or so between bookings and the removal of the trestle table used by the committee. But in each scene we learn a little more of their past and lives aside the village hall.
