On the Beach by John Osborne

John Osborne is becoming the bard of British minutia. Last year he applied his gift to finding the universal in the seemingly parochial and fleeting to John Peel's music collection. This year, the great British seaside is given an Osbornian gloss. 

On the Beach is good old-fashioned storytelling. One man, one stage, one story. The only nod to an art form from this side of the fall of the Roman Empire is a screen that projects images of Osborne's subject matter – beautifully captured moments from the seaside, all with an artfully wistful soundtrack. 

This is a gentle story about a lunch hour walking along the beach at Weymouth in Dorset. The beach, Osborne says, is the great equaliser. Everyone is on the same level. Everyone has left the world behind. And so he begins telling the imagined stories of those he encounters. An old couple just sitting on a bench are veterans of waltzes at the local Winter Gardens in the 1960s. The young family are not just playing cricket but forging a tradition to last the ages. A man just sitting, staring at the shifting sea, is having an existential crisis.

There is no drama here, no sideshow freaks or cancer scares. Just the gentle thrum of normality.

Of course it is incredibly arch. His characters are cyphers for something bigger. But in his own lo-fi way, Osborne reminds us that nothing is ever 'just' something. If you want to see it, he says, 'just' a lunchtime walk along a beach can contain the entire world.