THE BEST OF FRIENDS.

London/Tour

THE BEST OF FRIENDS
by Hugh Whitemore

Hampstead Theatre To 1 April 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm
Audio-described 25 March 3pm
Captioned 15 March
Post-show discussion 21 March
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7722 9301
www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 March

Letters, frequently made to seem conversations, make for a quietly satisfying evening.
Hugh Whitemore distils here several decades’ correspondence between three early 20th-century figures, ranging from the very public to the most private. Its civilised quality might appear staid; Shopping and Trainspotting needn’t fear for its cool.

Yet this is intelligent, considered letter writing from an age before email and txt recoded communications for an ever-faster whirligig of time and motion. When the final character’s left alive, it’s still the early 1950s and the sudden ringing of a telephone (landline, on stage) seems a rude elegy for a passed age.

These people should have made the worst of friends. Easy to imagine a dating-agency computer blowing its hard-drive sooner than matching atheist Sydney Cockerell, devout Catholic nun Laurentia McLachlan and Bernard Shaw, individualist in religion as everything else.

Yet they recognised kindred spirits behind their varying mindsets. Much seems anchored in Dame Laurentia. The staging reinforces this sense, the men dominating side areas while Patricia Routledge’s nun circles the centre (as Laurentia lived 70 years in Worcestershire’s Stanbrook Abbey it’s a miracle she met two such public figures). Her faith is an anchor-point of discussion, though the discourse ranges widely, with spiritual matters being those of faith rather than doctrine.

Laurentia, “the enclosed nun with the unenclosed mind”, requires Vatican permission to visit an East Anglian Abbey. It involves a day in London, and museum bigwig Cockerell takes childish glee in preparing to show her round cultural sites. This, and his assertion the apples she had sent him are so exceptionally fine, make for offputting clubbishness. No wonder this finicky book collector describes himself as second-rate.

So Michael Pennington, a first-rate actor, is just the person to portray him, infusing a dry stick with warmth and interest. Routledge evinces Laurentia’s zest for life and periods of anger with Shaw. Roy Dotrice’s incarnation of the Irish controversialist (ever the self-publicist, Shaw repeatedly makes loud entries in outlandish costumes) only improves as the character ages into his ninth decade, while James Roose-Evans is as easy with the style as could be expected from the creator of another engaging epistolary play, 84 Charing Cross Road:

Sir Sydney Cockerel: Michael Pennington
George Bernard Shaw: Roy Dotrice
Dame Laurentia McLachlan: Patricia Routledge

Director: James Roose-Evans
Designer: Simon Higlett
Lighting: Ben Ormerod
Sound: John Leonard

2006-03-13 11:47:31