Honour

Published Wednesday 15 February 2006 at 14:00 by Aleks Sierz

Honor has been married for more than 30 years to George, a pompous middle-aged journalist. For him, she gave up a promising career as a poet.

When Claudia, a ruthless and ambitious young writer, arrives to interview him for a profile, their meeting provokes a crisis in his marriage, affecting both Honor and the couple’s daughter, Sophie.

In this revival of Australian Joanna Murray-Smith’s 1995 play, the traditional marriage vow - to love, honour and obey - clashes with the reality of experience in what is little more than a series of highly articulate remarks about the illusions and miseries of wedlock. It is well observed, witty and full of wry truisms. Love, says Honor, is a complex mix of pleasure and pain. Marriage is all about two people growing old together.

At first, in Diana Rigg’s restrained and dignified performance, Honor is the defensive wife, stung by the younger woman’s suggestion that she has given up her career to be a helpmeet. Next, she’s the shell-shocked victim of her husband’s mid-life crisis, one hand clutched firmly to her forehead.

Finally, she outlives her martyr complex and blossoms into a survivor, with Rigg radiating confidence in her character’s new independence. As George, Martin Jarvis is mid-life crisis personified, with his hands thrust in his coat pockets and shoulders hunched in suppressed passion as he awkwardly faces the guilty truth about his dishonourable behaviour.

Meanwhile, Natascha McElhone’s cool and sophisticated Claudia contrasts nicely with Georgina Rich’s spirited and emotional Sophie. On Liz Ashcroft’s dark set, dominated by a large bookcase, director David Grindley’s production starts off at a smart pace and then relaxes into a quiet but rather bloodless examination of a mature marriage.