Honour
Wyndhams Theatre, London WC2
A warm and complacent marriage has a bucket of icy water thrown over it in Joanna Murray-Smith's nicely observed but unremarkable play. The shock arrives in the form of a frostily beautiful young journalist who awakens the passions of her interviewee, George, a conceited intellectual played by Martin Jarvis. His wife, Honor, once a poet of great promise, set her talent aside for the sake of her husband's career. Now, Honor is faced with a painful question that she has spent the last 32 years ignoring. Was a loyalty so easily fractured worth such sacrifice?
Diana Rigg is sympathetic as Honor, although she, like this production, never quite manages to plumb the emotional depths of the play. And Natascha McElhone as Claudia, the calculating journalist who is so deficient in the usual range of warm-blooded emotions that she could quite conceivably be an alien, tries without a great deal of success to convince us that her character is indeed human.
