Review: The Late Middle Classes - The Jewish Chronicle

Harold Pinter's production of Simon Gray's play never made it to the West End after it first appeared at the Watford Palace in 1999.

Perhaps a memory play that reminded us of the pallid Britain of the 1950s was not deemed relevant to the optimistic 1990s, when Tony Blair was riding high and Cool Britannia had yet to become as unfashionable as wearing socks with sandals.

Today's austerity Britain seems a lot closer to that post-euphoric, emotionally-stunted, casually antisemitic post-war period. So this revival should do well.

David Leveaux's stylish but melancholic production gives a lasting impression of the time's emotional detachment as lived by an only-child family headed by Peter Sullivan's stiff-upper-lipped pathologist Charles.

Charles used to patch up wounded airmen during the war, but now only deals with the dead and the reasons they died. If emotional detachment enabled him and the country to get through the war, Gray shows that in peacetime English reserve is just a form of dysfunction.

But it is the life of Charles's son Holly that frames the play. We first meet him as the fortysomething uninvited guest (also played by Sullivan) of Holly's old - now very old - piano teacher Brownlow.

The hesitant re-introduction done with, the play and the stage abruptly spin back in time to the early '50s where 12-year-old Holly (played by Laurence Belcher on the press night) is flanked by two relationships - his mother Celia and the now middle-aged Brownlow. And both sexualise their connection with the boy.

Robert Glenister's sweaty and intense Brownlow is infatuated with Holly, while Helen McCory's Celia is a glamorous - in a cigarette-and-lipstick kind of way - reluctant matriarch who implores her son to give reasons for his love, then complains at the inadequacy of his answer. He loves her because, he says, she is his mother.

This, though, is not a play about child abuse. Gray simply paints a portrait of the way things were at a particular time, and in two households where the war weighs heavily.

One of these households exists under a pall of peacetime banality, pierced by moments of shockingly off-hand bigotry.

"You don't think he's a Jew, do you?" asks Celia of Brownlow who has offered her son free lessons. "A lot of them are very artistic and musical. And at least he's not being a Jew on the money front."

In the other, a knock on the door is enough to freeze its occupants - Brownlow and his mother Ellie (Eleanor Bron) - with anxiety. Their past is implied rather than explained.

We know that Brownlow and his mother are haunted by whatever (thinly drawn) experience they endured during the war. We know also they are Austrian and we know that they are Jewish, not because they say so but because they are so quick to deny it.

Back in Holly's house, his mother and father shed their English reserve for a hammer-and-tongs argument about Charles's affair. Charles's defence hilariously boils down to wanting to do the right thing.

It all amounts to a strangely unresolved evening. Charles is sick of working with death, the betrayed Celia is socially stranded, while Brownlow is condemned to suffer a forbidden love and remain unrecognised as a composer.

But because period and people are so beautifully observed, the result is hugely satisfying, not least because of the terrific performances.

Most impressive of these is Belcher's Holly, whose child portrait is stunningly mature. Bron also stands out, her fearful Ellie saturated with the psychosis of persecution, while McCory and Sullivan effectively reveal the discontent beneath the manners of the middle classes.

How relevant a period play is does not matter that much when it is this true. (Tel: 0844 871 7624)