On its 1932 premiere Somerset Maugham's play must have seemed as if a small bomb had been detonated in the West End. Audiences expecting a witty comedy from the country's most popular playwright were reduced to silence by Maugham's anti-war polemic that charts the corrosive legacy of the first world war on a middle-class family. In fact it is fuelled by such bitter passion that it still has the power to shock.
When Sydney, the only son of the Ardsley clan, left blinded by the war, declares, "I know that we were the dupes of the incompetent fools who rule nations," I had to resist the urge to cheer. Contemporary resonances are not far away in a drama that brings the war back and picks over the bones of a future that ended with the armistice.
The play, meanwhile, is an old crock. People really do play tennis and say things such as "you filthy brute" and "rotter." But, at its best, Edward Hall's production has a Chekhovian delicacy beautifully realised in Francis O'Connor's design in which a bare branch hangs over the stage with its large tarnished mirror. This is Three Sisters transposed to the English countryside, with old maid Eva going mad with the knowledge she will never marry; stoic Ethel making the best of a bad marriage contracted in the passion of wartime; and younger sister Lois taking a hard-headed look at her future.
Some of the performances lack subtlety, but there is quiet power in Richard Clothier's cynical, knowing Sydney and moving work from Issy van Randwyck as Ethel, a woman who resolutely refuses to acknowledge her own unhappiness, and Tom Beard as Collie, the decorated wartime naval commander who discovers there is no place for him in a land fit for heroes.
· Until April 14. Box office: 01635 46044.
