Journalists enjoy seeing themselves depicted on stage. But while much of Lucinda Coxon’s play, based on a novel by Harriet Lane, takes place in the offices of a recognisable Sunday paper called the Questioner, it is suitably observant without being compellingly dramatic. Charting the steely self-advancement of an overlooked assistant on the books pages, it might be rechristened The Sub Also Rises.
The plot hinges on a simple coincidence. Frances, an overworked dogsbody, finds herself given unexpected access to the family of Laurence Kyte, a Booker prize-winning novelist. The reason is that Frances happened to be the last person to see alive Laurence’s wife when she was fatally trapped in a car on a country road. Relishing her entry into a privileged world from which she has long been excluded, Frances not only becomes an adoptive member of the Kyte family but also shamelessly exploits her newfound connections to advance her career: the in-house Cinderella of the books pages suddenly gets to go to the ball.
The idea of the outsider given entry to a forbidden world has a long literary history: it is there in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. While this version lacks the psychological or political resonance of those works, the real problem is that Frances’s progress goes virtually unchecked: she achieves everything she desires professionally and sexually and, aside from a brief moment when the son of the Kyte family questions her motives, she is never in jeopardy.
Even if that makes for predictable drama, the piece is stylishly presented. As Frances, Joanne Froggatt, released from incarceration in Downton Abbey, captures with great precision that mixture of charming plausibility and ratlike cunning that Nicholas Tomalin saw as the hallmark of the professional journalist. Robert Glenister as the smugly deceptive novelist, Leah Gayer as his messed-up daughter and Sylvestra Le Touzel as a harassed books editor provide good support; and Bob Crowley’s design ensures that Nicholas Hytner’s production moves briskly from hot-desking newspaper offices to the calm Suffolk countryside. It is all smoothly done without ever creating a palpable sense of danger.
At the Bridge theatre, London, until 30 March.
