The Stage

The Late Middle Classes

Published Wednesday 2 June 2010 at 11:44 by Mark Shenton

The belated arrival of Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes in London is late in every sense - it is 11 years since its original premiere at Watford’s Palace, where it was directed by Gray’s friend and associate, Harold Pinter.

Now they are both late, too, yet the play’s time has come at last, even as it looks ruefully back on a Britain of austerity to provide a quietly devastating memory play about the haunting of memories.

It’s also curiously appropriate that the play ends a lot later than a programme misprint would have it, a running time of 2 hours has been hastily stickered over and replaced by one of 2 hours 45 minutes.

But if David Leveaux, who inherits Pinter’s directorial mantle, may have inserted enough pregnant Pinteresque pauses to slow it down a bit, he has also lent it a heavy, heaving heartbeat that captures the poignant soul of the play and leaves your own heart beating a little bit faster.

Its portrait of a family - pathologist father, a possibly pathologised mother and their twelve-year-old son - is intimate and revealing of the needy relationships between them that partly echoes the more recent plays of Polly Stenham.

But it is also full of the resonance of the unspoken that Pinter’s own plays so wonderfully articulated, and the suppressed feelings of the Coward of Brief Encounter or Terence Rattigan, that bubble so inexpressibly below the surface.

There isn’t a more painfully funny demonstration of the clumsy attempts of a father to deliver a bit of sex education to his son than in this play, but the meat of the play is the even more significant relationship that the son forges instead with his piano teacher Brownlow.

This is also full of unspoken depths, and Leveaux’s production - and Robert Glenister’s reserved yet heartfelt performance as Brownlow - gives it a rare charge.

This was amplified on press night by the performance of Laurence Belcher, who shares the role of Holly with two other young actors, who conveyed sheer assurance yet also an endearing innocence, while Helen McCrory and Peter Sullivan are also superb as his parents.

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