Trelawny of the Wells

This is London

Since artistic director Josie Rourke began her tenure at the intimate Donmar, the space has been transformed for every production. For the stage directing debut of successful filmmaker Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina), designer Hildegard Bechtler has created a progressively stripped away illusion of a proscenium arch to embrace talk-of-the town actress Rose Trelawny’s lodgings, a grand Cavendish Square residence and backstage at the theatres where Arthur Wing Pinero’s gentle comedy unfolds.

Written in 1898 and with ‘some most respectful additions and ornamentation’ seamlessly supplied by Patrick Marber, it’s an affectionate account of the Victorian theatre in flux which needs a light touch to sustain it. But for much of the first half Wright’s production is too effortful as Amy Morgan’s Rose gives up her career for love. Moving into the home of her sweetheart’s stuffy upper class relatives ‘on approval’, she soon finds the atmosphere so suffocating – even a sneeze is greeted with disapproval – that she returns to her ‘gypsy’ friends and the theatre, only to find that she no longer quite fits in there, either.

Individually, several elements work well enough – Ron Cook on fine comic form as landlady Mrs Mossop (he also doubles as disapproving, snuff-sniffing Sir William); Daniel Mays’ lanky leading man swallowing his pride (if not his affectations) when financial circumstances demand; Maggie Steed whose perfectly timed delivery of a mere handful of lines split over two characters couldn’t be bettered.

But it’s only after the interval that Wright seems to trust the material sufficiently to let the cast move towards being sympathetic, credible people rather than the annoying caricatures whose theatrical demise the play itself predicts. The results, briefly, are surprisingly quite moving as the old shows signs of giving way to the new and acceptance and tolerance herald the possibility of a different future.

 

Donmar