Theatre Review
The Late Middle Classes
* * * *

by Claire Allfree, Metro, June 3, 2010

Thanks to the huge success of The Smoking Diaries, the late Simon Gray was almost in danger of being best remembered for his stupendous generosity to the tobacco industry. David Leveaux's revival of this deceptively easy-going 1999 portrait of a 1950s family reminds us of Gray's subtle skills as a dramatist. Helen McCrory plays Celia, a lively snob in straitened cirumstances, who seems to seek in her young precocious son Holly a watered-down sexual attention she has lost from her pathologist husband Charles. Holly (Laurence Belcher), meanwhile, is having piano lessons from Austrian refugee Mr. Brownlow, who lives alone with his frightened, strung-out mother (Eleanor Bron, whose performance borders on caricature): Mr. Brownlow in particular soon becomes a receptacle for suspicion and a very English form of xenophobia.

With themes of lies, austerity and the paranoia of persecution in war-shattered England, this gently depressing play is a chilling snapshot of a dark period in English history and steeped in an expansive regret over the unfulfilled dreams of youth and the thwarted aspirations of adulthood. Death is everywhere, be it the scorched memories of war, Charles's mortuary table or the wallpaper that smothers Mike Britton's front room set like verdigris. It's bookended by two scenes set in the present in which a grown-up Holly visits old Mr. Brownlow, and it's a measure of the play's teasing confidence that Gray leaves Brownlow a deliberately ambiguous figure. The usually impeccable Donmar has hit a few bum notes recently but this is an unsensational triumph.

Until July 17, Donmar Warehouse, Mon. to Sat. 7:30 pm, Thu. and Sat. mats. 2:30 pm, £13 to £29. Tel: 0844 871 7624. Tube: Covent Garden.

Caption: Class act: Helen McCrory and Laurence Belcher.