What a left-field delight this first-ever staging of a Barbara Pym novel proves to be. Adapted by Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Pym’s 1977 story is a bittersweet, crisply funny study of four lonely office workers, two of them women staring at the maw of enforced retirement.
Not the stuff of high drama, you’d think, and you’d be right. But Pym, Harvey and director Dominic Dromgoole weave a compelling miniature tapestry from the emotional evasions and thwarted intimacies of a quartet living lives (as Thoreau put it) “of quiet desperation”. The play is also a snapshot of 70s London, of food coupons, £20,000 semis and Van der Valk on the telly. And it furnishes superb roles for four character actors of a certain age.
Personalities and backstories are slowly revealed by what these uneasy colleagues conceal in conversation and what they concede in asides. “The elderly: how did I become one of those?” asks Kate Duchêne’s Letty, an affable, fluting woman contemplating a move to the country with a female friend after the house in which she has a bedsit is sold to an evangelical West African church. “Gusty singers. Very exuberant,” observes widower Edwin (Anthony Calf), who fills his empty time with observance at various high churches.
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Paul Rider’s more abrasive Norman opines that there’s nothing to do in the country except “count the number of insects stuck to your outside light”. Though he fantasises about a trip to Greece his holidays are spent eating fry-ups in his pyjamas in his own rented room.
Norman has a thinly veiled yen for Pooky Quesnel’s angular, retaliatory Marcia, who has in turn conceived a passion for the surgeon who performed her mastectomy – an operation she alludes to but never names. Like Edwin, Marcia is the owner of a modest home, which she has turned into a shrine to her dead mother and filled with tinned food and empty milk bottles.
There’s an obvious affinity between the agreeable Edwin and Letty and the spikier Norman and Marcia but Pym wrings exquisite comedy from their inability to connect. In Dromgoole’s staging, I particularly enjoyed Marcia batting away the family tin of coffee that she and Norman share (“a lovely arrangement and very practical,” says Edwin) as he dandles it flirtatiously on the partition between their desks.
There’s a similar awkwardness to the men’s attempts at blokey chat and Letty’s doomed forays into sisterliness with Marcia. We don’t even know what they do at work, in their tightly tessellated desks that designer Ellie Wintour places in a square, sunken, deep red conversation pit. Behind is a stopped clock and a doll’s house representing the Dulwich home of Marcia’s surgeon, a world away from their small lives. Spotlighting and plangent cello notes are effectively deployed.
These are lovely roles for subtle, understated actors. I particularly enjoyed Duchêne’s Letty and her air of quietly pressing on, illuminated by rare flashes of acerbity. Calf’s wispy Edwin is impressive too in his very indistinctness.
The other two have the more openly comic roles, with Rider’s Norman memorably, if counterintuitively, described by Marcia as “like a newt, the way he scurries around, shouting at cars”. Quesnel, in glasses the size of dinner plates, is hilarious as Marcia, even though the character’s obsessive-compulsive traits and growing psychological disorder are reinforced with little of the delicacy afforded the others.
After producing six successful comic novels in in the 1950s Pym was rejected by publishers, her reputation revived only in 1977 when she was named by Philip Larkin and critic Lord David Cecil as the most underrated writer of the previous 75 years. Quartet in Autumn was published and nominated for the Booker and her earlier works were rediscovered and optioned.
She was elected to the Royal Society of Literature, went on Desert Island Discs and hastily completed one more book, A Few Green Leaves, which was published shortly after her death from a recurrence of breast cancer in 1980. It’s impossible not to see a foreshadowing by Pym, or at least an act of homage to her by Harvey and Dromgoole, in Letty’s final line here: “I have a choice!”
To 20 June, arcolatheatre.com
