Oh dear, oh dear. Fans of Keeley Hawes will no doubt leap at the chance to see her at close quarters, but there’s no other reason to bother with this surprisingly limp period piece from Lucy Kirkwood, the writer who dazzled us only a few months ago with the National’s gorgeous adaptation of Roald Dahl’s cod horror tale The Witches.
Kirkwood’s new drama, set at the dawn of the NHS, stumbles from one under-nourished scene to another, a posse of stage hands constantly rushing in with props. At one point I began to wonder if all the running around might be some clever metaphor for the pressures on NHS staff. Sadly, it’s simply a sign of how this production — co-directed by Ann Yee and the venue’s outgoing artistic director Michael Longhurst — doesn’t really know how to marshal its resources.
Kirkwood seems unsure of what kind of play she is trying to write. Is it a staid, semi-documentary celebration of the founding ideals of the NHS? Or is it a clever-clever meta-romance full of sly parallels with the thwarted emotions of Brief Encounter? It fails on both counts.
Hawes’s character, Iris Elcock, is painfully one-dimensional, a hard-working Shropshire GP and Labour councillor with ambitions to become an MP. Stuck in a tepid marriage with a doctor and wounded veteran (Tom Goodman-Hill) who abruptly reveals himself to be a diehard opponent of Labour’s plans, she strikes up a relationship with a screen actor who has, conveniently enough, returned home from Hollywood to spend time with his ailing mother.
Jack Davenport injects plausibility into the slender role of George Blythe, a self-confessed “shit” who stayed in America during the war and built a comfortable career from playing smooth-talking sub-George Sanders types on screen. If the affair is just about believable, it’s undercut at every turn by black-and-white video close-ups, a sentimental soundtrack and the presence of a camera crew.
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With members of the supporting cast, including the thoroughly under-used Siobhan Redmond, playing multiple roles, the storyline dissolves into a dreary sequence of contrived crises. “The human body can go wrong in so many ways,” Iris’s husband declares when he realises his wife has strayed. And so, too, can a sub-standard play.
★★☆☆☆
165 minutes with interval
To April 13, donmarwarehouse.com
