Director Stephen Unwin’s uncluttered revival of David Storey’s most intriguing play pays due respect to its legendary original Royal Court production, starring those theatrical knights John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, but is never in awe of it.
His production of this beautifully written work, for the Peter Hall Company summer season at the Theatre Royal Bath, discovers a strong hint of Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd in the inconsequential and reflective nature of the dialogue. But it is at its best in exploring the insecurities and psychological flaws of four very fragile people, inmates in a metal institution that in turn becomes a metaphor for a nation in decline.
David Calder and Stephen Moore fit like hands in a good pair of gloves into the roles of the two elderly, eccentric gentlemen, engaged at first in genteel conversation in the sunlit garden of a fine country house, and appearing to epitomise a lost world of civility and good manners. But the audience rapidly recognises the underlying sadness of their past and present condition, and this is accentuated when they are replaced by two down to earth, feisty women, who are also in desperate need of friendship and compassion.
Nichola McAuliffe and Lesley Joseph serve up equal measures of laughter and pathos as the raunchy female inmates, and the second act presence of Matthew Wilson, as a brain-damaged weightlifter, makes the other four appear almost sane.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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