There are no unsafe structures in Lettice and Lovage. Peter Shaffer’s 1987 play, revived in homage by his director friend Trevor Nunn, is a cosy and comforting diatribe about how much we hate modern architecture, with a cosy and comforting cast to match. Felicity Kendal as Lettice Douffet is centre stage for much of the play and holds it steadily.
Eccentric, theatrical and passionate, Lettice is frustrated by her dreary tour guide duties around Fustian House, one of England’s dullest stately homes. Dashing up and down a Tudor staircase, she livens things up by dispensing increasingly bonkers historical nonsense to bored tourists. Her fabrications are found out and she is sacked by the iron-hard, analytical, failed architect Lotte Schoen (an aptly brittle Maureen Lipman, who makes a fine drunk). The craftily adaptable set, laid out by Robert Jones, works a treat as the talk moves from Fustian to London. With Lettice and Lotte’s battle for dominance settled in the bowels of a bohemian Earl’s Court bedsit, the pair of aesthetic martinets are set on their course, interspersed with great windbag passages of prose.
Thirty years on from its last major airing, Lettice and Lovage, centring on the nervous friendship of two splendidly trying women, still rattles around the space created by the Bechdel test, where a work of fiction should feature at least two women talking about something other than a man. And although there could be some madder, badder moments, able support from the cast, especially Petra Markham as Miss Framer, helps the story unroll with some pleasant meanders, so that everyone has a good enough time.
