Inheritance – review

Remember Look and Learn, the children's comic that aimed to educate as it entertained? It's been on my mind a lot in the past few weeks, watching plays where characters keep telling one another things the playwright wants the audience to understand: William Nicholson's Crash – bankers' values; Richard Bean's The Big Fellah – the IRA in the USA. Now Mike Packer's doing the same thing in Inheritance. The idea is good, focusing on one family's fortunes to tell the story of how Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy council-housing policy transformed postwar "homes fit for heroes" into collateral that made loadsa credit available to all, until the mortgage bubble burst. The 70-year-old widower, Harry, his two wildly different sons and their wives are engagingly played. But their debt dilemmas are so jam-packed with over-explained background information that the drama becomes cramped and a promising play becomes instead an educative evening's entertainment.