The Stage

Otherwise Engaged

Published Wednesday 2 November 2005 at 17:55 by Mark Shenton

Simon Gray’s forensic, career-long pursuit of the buttoned-up emotions of a particular kind of Englishman - literary, sardonic, who craves for nothing more than settling down into a sofa with a recording of Wagner’s Parsifal for company - has one of its fullest expressions in this 30-year-old play, now revived in an elegantly staged production that fits very snugly into the intimate Criterion.

Of course, in this play the Wagner is a long-time coming. As his lead character, an Islington publisher - not perhaps coincidentally also called Simon - is assailed by a constant stream of visitors and interruptions, from his upstairs lodger and his schoolmaster brother to best friend Jeff and Jeff’s mistress, a brittle (but seldom brutal) comedy of University-class manners and matters emerges.

And in a play of Simons, it is directed by another - Simon Curtis orchestrates it with loving period care, from the moment that the curtain rises on Simon fondly caressing the vinyl that contains more pleasure for him than the human interactions that will follow.

But there’s also a challenge in the play that is not met by this production’s central casting - it is the volume of Simon’s silence that speaks loudest for the character. But though Richard E Grant is good at the external characteristics of bravado that he hides behind, there isn’t much in the way of internal acting going on; even the real tear that he sheds at the end seems purely to be on the outside.

But there are more fully inhabited performances from the supporting cast, most especially David Bamber as an unexpected visitor with a whole baggage of underachieving disappointments to account for.