TENTACLES STRETCHING INTO PAST AND FUTURE
Electricity is coming to the village but the elderly Randolphs wont bother, preferring the paraffin lamplight of their forebears. Their house , comfortably middle-class, has seen generations play in its nursery. It’s their heart, and the family gathering fourteen-strong with children for Dora and Philip’s golden wedding have it embedded in their memories. Not always benignly, for Dodi Smith’s1938 hit play focuses sharply both on the perennial pains and joys of kinship – including losses – and on the social changes of the interwar period. Emily Burns’ production does it proud: it’s an exquisitely performed watercolour of a play, a period piece capturing a moment when not only was war looming – on its first night the news was of Chamberlain meeting Herr Hitler – but England was feeling the pains of evolution.
For late Edwardiana is there, as Lindsay Duncan’s amiable, demanding (and often very funny) Dora has a lady-companion Fenny: an unenviable status hovering awkwardly well above mere servants but below the actual family. In opening scenes the child Billy (the kids are terrific). perceptively observes it might be better to be a maid, because “they get a day off”. Charles the patriarch is a man of enough private means to have done nothing in particular with his life – always meant to write a book or go into Parliament but settled for being “happy..so happy I sometimes think of raising a statue to myself”. They hung on to the old nanny, who is now tending a visiting great-grandchild in his cot , but nannies are already a luxury the young parents can’t quite afford. One daughter Marjorie is a contentedly surrended traditional wife, whose wooing was a simple matter of just “twining myself round Kenneth”. Yet alongside these happy relics the 20c is advancing fast, so their remaining children – two lost to the first war or after it – are far more modern figures. Nicholas is an emotionally underdeveloped advertising man who talks on radio panels, Hilda an estate agent making thousands a year and anxious phone calls. Cynthia is broodingly recovering from an affair in Paris, and there’s Belle, a widowed septuagenarian sister-in law fresh from America with dyed hair and a facelift which makes silver-haired Dora murmur that it must be dangerous taking a face like that out in the rain. Belle in turn sweetly says to Dora’s daughters that “only a very happy woman can dare trust to nature as your mother has”. A wonderful pair, Lindsay Duncan and Kate Fahy on top form. So is Malcolm Sinclair as Charles, dodging featly round the fact that Belle only married his late brother because she couldn’t have him. Bethan Cullinane’s Cynthia offers a fine, low-key portrait of a woman who broke the rules for love’s sake and lost: there is a deeply affecting nursery conversation between her and the orphaned child “Scrap” about the way that grief creates a limbo of non-feeling.
The yearnings and frustrations, old griefs and frivolous , sentimental or painful memories of all the family – the dear octopus whose tentacles hold them all – are delicately drawn. It is a fine ensemble cast in a glorious set by Frankie Bradshaw, revolving rooms each with a flickering real fire. The whole thing feels Chekhovian, though the ending – no spoilers – is less so.
But best of all, at its centre is the wonderful performance by Bessie Carter as Fenny, the ‘companion’ who is not quite family: patronized and pitied by some of the sisters ,used as a gofor with charming unconcern by Dora, and flirted with by the coxcomb Nicholas, who is too immature to notice that she is longingly in love with him. Carter brings it immense dignity, and great emotional power in her gentle self-control , shading to an edge of girlish hope as Nicholas teases her by marooning her on top of a nursery cupboard, then into humiliation and a reckless attempt to be like other young women, carefree at the evening dance.
As the first half ends and the others wander off unconcernedly, she is the one we glimpse as the set revolves again: a stalwart faithful helper, alone the high stepladder hanging all the damn bunting for their revels, with no sign of any chivalry to assist her. And again towards the end she is the one relied on to make waterlilies out of napkins when the first starched lot fall victim to an emotional rapport between mother and wayward Cynthia. Bessie Carter is, in short, understatedly, intelligently, feelingly terrific. A new star on an NT debut.
Nationaltheatre.org.uk. To 27 March.
Rating 4
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