The Stage

The Thunderbolt

Published Monday 6 September 2010 at 12:25 by John Thaxter

Sam Walters’ latest rediscovery, Pinero’s long-forgotten family drama - something of a flop in 1908 - gets the full Orange Tree treatment: a brilliant cast playing with panache, a talented design team cleverly creating five effective settings, plus handsome period costumes.

Stuart Fox (Thaddeus Mortimore) and Natalie Ogle (Phyllis) in The Thunderbolt at the Orange Tree, Richmond Photo: Tristram Kenton

But what of the play? When a Midlands brewer dies, apparently without leaving a will, his kinfolk meet to squabble over their estranged brother’s estate. But first an illegitimate daughter turns up from Paris looking for reassurance that she is still daddy’s girl, then a distraught member of the family confesses to having read and destroyed a handwritten will which left everything to the daughter.

Dramatically speaking, the plot, with its focus on legal niceties, greed and small-town politics, has enough potential for a two-hour comedy. But Pinero stretched his repetitive material across almost three hours, involving several disagreeable characters and only the barest whiff of a love match for added interest.

As in life, the lawyers have the best of it, with a dazzling display of professional aplomb from David Antrobus and Vincent Brimble, who lead us through the legal and moral maze of English laws of intestacy.

There are also nicely contrasted performances from Geoff Leesley as a brusque but straight businessman and David Whitworth as his waspish brother, proprietor of a local temperance newspaper, while Janet Spencer-Turner makes a welcome return to the Orange Tree as a socialite wife.

But the evening belongs to Stuart Fox and Natalie Ogle as fraught family outsiders and Grainne Keegan as the serene, almost saintly daughter.