The Stage

There Came a Gypsy Riding

Published Friday 19 January 2007 at 17:45 by Jeremy Austin

Almeida casting director Maggie Lunn has drawn together a family so intertwined, so easy to believe, that the play itself is in danger of offering nothing more (or less) than a guilty peak into the home of a grief-stricken family.

So well-observed is Frank McGuinness’ script that it almost leaves one wondering what have we learned as an audience other than this is how an ordinary family deals with an extraordinary tragedy.

McGuinness stuffs the first two acts with backstory but the gentle, teasing skill with which he draws it out makes it almost imperceptible.

His main accomplice is Eileen Atkins in a measured, deeply comic and tragically profound performance as Bridget - the family’s near neighbour and mad cousin. Atkins mesmerises the audience, drawing them in to Bridget’s insane world and then, in a flash of clarity, dropping an over-large dollop of reality into the fray.

Her performance is matched by Imelda Staunton as the family’s grieving mother Margaret. She finds so much dignity in the character and yet conveys the frailty that lies just under the surface. Her scene with son Simon - played by the always impressive Aidan McArdle - seems to draw in around it the silence and intensity of the deserted beach house (beautifully rendered by designer Robert Jones) in which they are talking.

Attenborough’s understanding of the dynamics needed to drive what could be a rather difficult play manage to create a feeling, if not of sympathy for the broken family, then certainly a macabre interest with their almost unbearable loss.