Written two years after John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and four before Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Peter Shaffer’s family drama resembles both. But for all its dancing around repressed homosexuality, frustrated sexual desire and family conflict, it lacks the savagery of either. It harks back to a pre-1956 style of drama, in which discontented privileged people hurl veiled accusations at each other as if in some deadly competition to prove they are more unhappy than anyone else.
Despite the exhausting shouting, Jamie Glover’s revival is quite dainty. Walter (Lorne MacFadyen) is a young German, in flight from his country’s past, whose rose-tinted view of England and the English is tested when he takes a job tutoring Pam (Terenia Edwards), the teenage daughter of the dysfunctional Harrington family in their Suffolk retreat. Walter thinks he’s landed in paradise. But Pam’s pretentious, dissatisfied mother, Louisa (Lucy Cohu), is at war with her furniture factory-owning husband, Stanley (Jason Merrells). The battleground is culture and their eldest child, Clive (Tom Morley), a Cambridge student who can never fulfil his father’s expectations for him to be a golf-playing hearty. Walter’s quiet presence acts as a catalyst on family tensions.
The aim may be to present a suburban and distinctly English-Greek tragedy, but the execution is lacking. Clive observes there is something odd about the way the entire family never gather together, but after two and half hours in which people keep getting called away to urgently cook an egg, you begin to suspect the real problem is that the youthful Shaffer simply didn’t know how to write dialogue for more than two people.
Jason Merrells is terrific, suggesting the muted pain of a crusty self-made man who is baffled by his son and manipulative wife. This work, however, is no neglected masterpiece. It is simply a reminder of how much British playwriting has changed in the last 60 years.
• At the Print Room, London, until 13 February. Box office: 020-3642 6606.
