"Geography," wrote EC Bentley, "is about Maps but Biography is about Chaps." Shelagh Stephenson's new play at the Cottesloe, however, seeks to reconcile the two by providing us with a retrospective portrait of an amateur map-collector who is close to death. The result is a humane, compassionate play that makes up in psychological perception what it lacks in external excitement.
Stephenson's focus is squarely on the figure of Jack Armstrong. He is a testy old curmudgeon who sits in an English garden awaiting extinction and surveying the apparently featureless map of his own life. The garden belongs to his 40ish daughter Anna, about to marry a black lawyer and excited to discover that her ancestors include not only a plantation owner but also an authentic slave. But Jack, a former book-keeper with a passion for maps, is more concerned with his own sense of failure and with acknowledging the secret guilt that has corroded his life.
The Ibsenite revelation, when it finally comes, is not shocking enough to explain Jack's pervasive gloom. It is also too carefully planted, as if Stephenson has tidied up the closet before inserting the skeleton. Where she is good is in conveying the crabbed captiousness of old age and its confirmation of family favouritism: Jack has always indulged Anna but been irritated by his son Michael, an actor. The distinction is beautifully brought out in a family poker game that ends in rage and recrimination. Best of all, Stephenson presents Jack without judging him. Her final point is that in even the most ordinary existence, there is always a secret map that constitutes the real life.
In its suggestion that attention must be paid to the humblest lives, Stephenson's play has obvious echoes of Death of a Salesman. And Alun Armstrong, replacing the indisposed Ian Holm, invests Jack with the same quiet magnetism he once brought to Willy Loman. The difference is that Jack's life is all in the past; but Armstrong beautifully suggests the impatience of the auto-didact, the licensed childishness of the old and the terror of nothingness that confronts the agnostic. In one sense, since Armstrong himself is much younger than Jack, it is a brilliant piece of character acting. In another way, the performance draws deeply on the actor's own humanity.
Lia Williams endows Anna with a glowing mixture of filial love and nervous ebullience, Tim McInnerny makes what sense he can of a dubiously relevant tirade against English philistinism about acting, and there is a peach of a performance from James Hayes as an anxiously hearty Catholic priest. Bill Alexander directs with scrupulous care a play that may not set the world alight, but views old age with exceptional, unsentimental understanding.
· Until November 29. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
