The combined reputations of Harold Pinter as a director and Simon Gray as a writer weren't enough to secure a West End transfer for this at least partly autobiographical memory play after its Watford premiere in 1999. A boy band musical snapped up the space instead.
The intervening years have claimed the lives of both Pinter and playwright, but finally this sardonic but affecting portrayal of characters from the not so distant postwar past has made it to central London courtesy of David Leveaux's enjoyable and appropriately ambiguous revival.
Topped and tailed by the now grown up Holly's unannounced visit to his former music teacher, Austrian refugee Mr. Brownlow (an intentionally unappealing Robert Glenister), it takes place mainly in the 50's, when Holly was a pubescent schoolboy under pressure from his mother to win the scholarship to Westminster that would enable the family to relocate to the capital without the worry of school fees.
Frustrated by a life offering her little more than tennis, gin and cigarettes whilst she waits for her pathologist husband to come home from the hospital which seems (with suspicious frequency) to require his evening services, she's a compulsive attentionseeker who makes far too many emotional demands on her only son, whilst paying scant attention to his adolescent vulnerability. Helen McCrory plays her with the tight, flamboyant vivacity of a woman who might crack at any time.
As her husband, Peter Sullivan's dry, detached Charles is happy to delve into the bodies of the dead, but, in a cleverly comic confrontation, is far too uncomfortable to tell Holly about the birds and the bees.
Preoccupied with their own concerns, neither parent pays much attention to Brownlow's increasing interest in his star pupil. Invited back for extra lessons, Holly is plied with tea and cake by Brownlow's nervously worried, sherry-sipping mother (Eleanor Bron) whose desperate denials of any Jewish connection reveal her barely concealed fear of being ousted, once again, from her home.
It's more a study of people than plot, but Gray's dialogue often sparkles, Mike Britton's wallpapered-over set mimics the suppressed feelings pushing against the surface, and Harvey Allpress (who shares the role with two others) gives an astonishingly assured performance as polite young Holly, caught up in the middle of adult emotions he can only begin to understand.
Donmar
The intervening years have claimed the lives of both Pinter and playwright, but finally this sardonic but affecting portrayal of characters from the not so distant postwar past has made it to central London courtesy of David Leveaux's enjoyable and appropriately ambiguous revival.
Topped and tailed by the now grown up Holly's unannounced visit to his former music teacher, Austrian refugee Mr. Brownlow (an intentionally unappealing Robert Glenister), it takes place mainly in the 50's, when Holly was a pubescent schoolboy under pressure from his mother to win the scholarship to Westminster that would enable the family to relocate to the capital without the worry of school fees.
Frustrated by a life offering her little more than tennis, gin and cigarettes whilst she waits for her pathologist husband to come home from the hospital which seems (with suspicious frequency) to require his evening services, she's a compulsive attentionseeker who makes far too many emotional demands on her only son, whilst paying scant attention to his adolescent vulnerability. Helen McCrory plays her with the tight, flamboyant vivacity of a woman who might crack at any time.
As her husband, Peter Sullivan's dry, detached Charles is happy to delve into the bodies of the dead, but, in a cleverly comic confrontation, is far too uncomfortable to tell Holly about the birds and the bees.
Preoccupied with their own concerns, neither parent pays much attention to Brownlow's increasing interest in his star pupil. Invited back for extra lessons, Holly is plied with tea and cake by Brownlow's nervously worried, sherry-sipping mother (Eleanor Bron) whose desperate denials of any Jewish connection reveal her barely concealed fear of being ousted, once again, from her home.
It's more a study of people than plot, but Gray's dialogue often sparkles, Mike Britton's wallpapered-over set mimics the suppressed feelings pushing against the surface, and Harvey Allpress (who shares the role with two others) gives an astonishingly assured performance as polite young Holly, caught up in the middle of adult emotions he can only begin to understand.
Donmar
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