LLOYD GEORGE KNEW MY FATHER. To 21 March.
Tour.
LLOYD GEORGE KNEW MY FATHER
by William Douglas Home.
Tour to 21 March 2009.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 January at Richmond Theatre.
Revival of comedy theatre history has bypassed.
It’s well to recall that, throughout theatre’s radical decades in the sixties and seventies, while the Royals (Shakespeare Company and Court) were hosting Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty or Edward Bond’s barbarities (stoning a baby, gouging-out eyes) and apocalypse could be found nightly on the fringe, William Douglas Home was serving his theatre of contentment to West End audiences.
Plays like this, from 1972, with its catchy but irrelevant title from a near-meaningless song; an aristocratic drawing-room comedy with the ease of a playwright whose brother had renounced his peerage to become Tory Prime Minister. Not that William ever needed to replay family history. Unlike Lady Boothroyd, so incensed the garden bestowed by one Stuart king and admired by another, will be spoilt as bulldozers plough a bypass through her land (with her MP son’s agreement, and with financial compensation) she announces she will not live to see the desecration begin on Monday morning.
From her threat grows the slight plot, its main function being to allow fantasticated diversions by her husband William. This part, created by Ralph Richardson, now falls aptly into the lap of Edward Fox, giving another of his demonstrations of rickety magnificence.
Time seems an alien dimension in Fox’s performance. Pauses that go on almost too long, sudden spurts of repetition, unlikely but loveably shrewd observations, and the briefest of sightings of affection for his soon-to-depart wife, meet in a performance that’s both highly mannered and so natural-seeming you wonder if it’s the actor whose mind’s wandered – until a sharp quill of wit reaches its mark at the precise moment.
If he decorates such plot as exists - Home sidesteps matters at their climax – it’s Lady B who drives the inaction. Claire Bloom was originally advertised for this revival, but Helen Ryan’s performance is a matter for rejoicing. Doubtless differing from the interpretation Bloom would have offered, Ryan provides a perfect picture of effortlessly assured aristocracy, her slight figure commanding the scene and creating the character’s strength through composure.
Other performances are more functional, but director Richard Digby Day duly allows Home – and Fox – their humours.
General Sir William Boothroyd: Edward Fox.
Lady Boothroyd: Helen Ryan.
Hubert Boothroyd MP: Andrew Wincott.
Maud Boothroyd: Lucinda Curtis.
Sally Boothroyd: Charity Reindorp.
Simon Green: Dudley Hinton.
Rev Trevor Simmonds: John Heffernan.
Robertson: Derek Wright.
Director: Richard Digby Day.
Designer: Paul Farnsworth.
Lighting: Stephen Wentworth.
Sound: Gina Hills.
Assistant director: Alexander Gilmour.
2009-01-29 00:49:53