Trafalgar Studios, London
There are excellent performances from a cast including Toby Stephens and Claire Skinner, in a fine revival of Nichols’ humane play
Thu 3 Oct 2019 15.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 3 Oct 2019 16.35 BST
It is 52 years since Peter Nichols’s debut play arrived in the West End and caused a sensation. Here was a young dramatist making a moving comedy out of a taboo subject: the strains on a marriage of bringing up a severely disabled child. Seeing Simon Evans’s revival of this brilliant play so soon after Nichols’s death, I was struck by how much has changed in the last half-century.
We are both more used to plays about disability and more circumspect in how we treat the subject. The first half of Nichols’s play, in which we see parents Bri and Sheila adopting various defence mechanisms to cope with the situation, now arouses only fitful laughter. The couple engage in various forms of roleplay, with Bri sending up the deficiencies of the medical and clerical professions and memorably describing God as “a sort of manic-depressive rugby footballer”. But it is only in the second half, when Nichols exposes the nervous reactions of Bri and Sheila’s friends to the presence of a non-able-bodied child, that the play’s rich social comedy fully emerges.
The play also radically changes depending on how it is cast. Joe Melia, the original Bri, and Eddie Izzard in a 2001 revival both seized on the character’s satirical verve. Toby Stephens, who gives an excellent performance, takes a different tack. He is momentarily funny as when, assuming the role of a hands-on vicar, he edges ever closer to Claire Skinner’s Sheila. But the stress in Stephens’s performance is on Bri’s helpless need for attention and looming disintegration. There’s a revealing moment when Sheila says of her husband “he lives with despair”. That is what Stephens gives us, in a performance that suggests Bri’s endless jokes are a way of staving off a total crack-up.
Skinner, in contrast, admirably shows that Sheila is sustained by faith in the future and an uncomplicated love for her daughter. In one of the many direct addresses to the audience that are a trademark Nichols touch, Skinner also demonstrates that Sheila is the more perceptive marital partner: she pins down perfectly Bri’s self-pity and, comparing her husband and daughter, says she doesn’t know who is the greater baby.
But, while the Bri-Sheila scenes are painfully good, it is with the arrival of the three other characters that the production achieves true hilarity. Clarence Smith is very funny as a do-gooder who believes money can fix everything and who apologetically cries: “I tend to raise my voice when I’m helping people.” As his wife, Lucy Eaton gives a lethally accurate portrayal of a fashion-conscious woman who advocates a form of beneficent euthanasia and who can’t stand anything “non-physically attractive”. There is also the bonus of Patricia Hodge who, as Bri’s protective mum, spears a certain kind of waspish decorum, and of Storme Toolis who gives the play’s titular heroine a moving physical presence. While Nichols’s play may have lost its initial shock value, this revival shows it still possesses a rare truth and humanity.
• At the Trafalgar Studios, London, until 30 November
