After years of neglect, the minutely observed slice-of-life dramas of the 1960s are back in fashion. Earlier this year Oxford Stage Company put on David Storey's The Contractor, and now the same director, Sean Holmes, tackles Storey's second play, in which the author returns to his Wakefield roots. It concerns the Shaws, a collier family, whose three sons have moved down south. But as they return home to celebrate their parents' 40th wedding anniversary, the family is fractured by fraternal strife, and the gulf opens between working-class parents and the offspring they were determined to educate.
This is a long evening, and not very much happens. The specifics of the family's problems are always implicit rather than explicit. But the overall effect is one of an emotional storm in which the resentments of the past blight the present and the future. The youngest son, Stephen, once the golden boy of the family, is reduced almost to catatonia. Directed and acted with diamond-hard brilliance, this is an evening that takes you way beyond the kitchen sink and right to the coalface of working-class domestic life.
Down to the gas meter in the scullery and the tasselled settee in the spick-and-span front room, Anthony Lamble's set design is as detailed as Storey's devastating observations. There is a heart-stopping moment when dad talks about working down the mine in a seam just 13 inches wide. You suddenly realise how much he loves his terrible, dirty job - in sharp contrast to his sons, who have material wealth and status but feel spiritually unconnected and displaced.
The writer Dominic Dromgoole has suggested that Storey was the true inheritor of Chekhov's gift for structured, poetic naturalism. There is plenty of truth in that. Just as we watch Chekhov's plays with the knowledge that the way of life depicted will shortly be blasted away, it is impossible to view In Celebration without the hindsight of history. It is not just Dad Shaw who is a dying breed. His sons are also on the verge of extinction.
Until August 4. Box office: 01243 781312.
