Philip King is best known for See How They Run, which contains the unforgettable line: “Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars.” This play, which is the last of King’s 11 unaided works and first appeared in 1970, is a Freudian family drama that touches on religion but, although it’s well done, leaves me feeling that farce was this writer’s true metier.
Set in Lancashire, the play shows David, an earnest 19-year-old follower of the Salvation Army, taking in a lodger after his mother’s death. Since Bess, the paying guest, is a life-loving barmaid her presence excites the concern of David’s religious superior and the sexual appetite of his fugitive dad, who is paying an unexpected return visit home. What follows is a primal father-son battle over Bess, but for all the story’s Oedipal overtones I was struck by its improbabilities. You wonder why on earth Bess would be drawn to the blatantly misogynist dad and why King makes so little of David’s guilt over the lies he tells to the Salvation Army major.
The piece survives, in Tricia Thorns’ production, largely through the quality of the acting. Mia Austen has a touch of the young Billie Whitelaw as the big-hearted Bess, Sebastian Calver catches the callowness of the boy David, John Sackville lends his father a reptilian zest and Patience Tomlinson is all maternal kindness as the major. But despite occasional nods to Look Back in Anger – including the sight of Bess behind the ironing board and the sound of David playing the cornet in place of Jimmy Porter’s trumpet – it remains a determinedly old-fashioned play.
At Finborough theatre, London, until 31 August.
