The textbooks all tell us that postwar British theatre, prior to the Royal Court revolution of the mid-1950s, was as arid as the Gobi desert. But a popular myth, lately dented by revivals of Terence Rattigan and Graham Greene, is further punctured by this production of Lesley Storm's intriguing family drama, which ran for 409 performances in 1949. What it proves is that women writers then were as alert as modern feminists to the menace of a patriarchal society.
Storm's heroine, Alicia, is a supposedly average middle-class woman. Not that average, perhaps, since she lives in a plush house on the Chelsea Embankment. But the crisis arises when she's arrested for nicking a black chiffon nightdress from a department store on the eve of her son's wedding. Under questioning from a psychiatrist, it emerges that Alicia has been driven by a subconscious desire to compete with her future daughter-in-law and is the pivotal figure in an Oedipal drama in which father and son are bitterly at odds.
The big question is whether Alicia will expose the family's dark secrets to save herself going to prison. But, although I could live without a superfluous final scene that wraps everything up too neatly, Storm is very good at exposing the pressures women faced in the male-dominated late-1940s: without a hint of bludgeoning didacticism, she shows that they were expected to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the dominating male ego. And the point emerges subtly in Andy Brunskill's Tough Theatre company revival. Maggie Daniels as Alicia hits just the right note of bourgeois inhibition and, even if Keith Chanter is a shade too vehement as her bullying husband, Gary Heron is excellent as the humane shrink who probes the muddy waters of English family life.
Until 30 January. Box office: 020-7793 9193.
