The Gathered Leaves at the Park Theatre review: a slowly beguiling, elegant revival

Autism, racism, domestic bust-ups and generational rifts. Andrew Keatley’s slowly beguiling, 1997-set country house drama covers a lot of ground. It’s an old-fashioned and at times schematic family saga that nonetheless treats its multiple themes with seriousness and care and eventually exerts a cumulative power. Like the original production at the Park ten years ago, Adrian Noble’s elegant revival is peopled with thoroughbred stage actors, who plough determinedly through the boggier bits of dialogue and exposition.

Britain is on the verge of a New Labour landslide, and in the handsome ancestral home of the Pennington clan change is also afoot. Beakish paterfamilias William (Jonathan Hyde) is a senior lawyer and an autocratic stickler for tradition, forced to unbend a little in the face of his 75th birthday and a diagnosis of vascular dementia. His wife Olivia (Joanne Pearce) is pretty much the textbook expression of “long-suffering”.

Their youngest child, Alice (Olivia Vinall) has returned to the fold for the first time in 17 years, with the mixed-heritage teenage daughter whose conception prompted the family schism. Eldest son Samuel (Richard Stirling) is high on the autism spectrum – affectionate, loyal and a mine of obsessive knowledge, but prone to meltdowns if his rituals or wants are disrupted. Stuck in the jaws of the family vice is middle child Giles (Chris Larkin), a doctor who is Samuel’s best friend and defender but a constant disappointment to his father, his wife and his children.

At first William seems a two-dimensional domestic tyrant but Keatley and Hyde deepen him through the slow revelation of flaws and regrets, and of scars left by both war and his privileged upbringing. The portrayal of autism on stage and screen is tricky but Stirling suggests the workings of Samuel’s mind and emotions sympathetically and sensitively. (I’ve known several people with autism and with dementia, and the depiction of both conditions rings true.) The actual centre of the play is Giles, given a powerful aura of defeated decency by Larkin.

(Rich Southgate)

True to William’s patriarchal world view, the women are sidelined - fetching and carrying, cleaning up emotional and physical messes, complaining about getting their clothes wet in a rain shower. But Pearce gives Olivia a harried dignity: she also has a similar dark-brown intonation to Zoë Waites as Giles’s wife Sophie, which is either a nice touch or a happy accident. Vinall shines despite getting some of the worst lines.

There’s a lovely, tipsy scene between Taneetra Porter as Alice’s daughter Aurelia and Ella Dale as Giles and Sophie’s daughter Emily. Still, the funniest quips go to Emily’s brother Simon (George Lorimer) and latterly to William. When his grandfather urges him to start spawning sons and settle into one of the two approved family callings, Simon protests that there are other professions beyond law and medicine. “Oh yes,” says William blithely. “Some of them semi-respectable…”

The script is ponderous at times and each act starts with a scene featuring Samuel and Giles as schoolboys, an overemphatic underlining of their special bond. But the play is also a delightful nostalgia-fest for 90s kidz. Trivial Pursuit! The Spice Girls on the cover of The Face! References to the schmaltzy Hoffman/Cruise “autism savant” movie Rain Man and the Renault Clio adverts featuring “Nicole” and her “Papa”! There’s a scramble in the final scene to tie up the loose ends. But the play closes on the last of several powerful stage images that show that even the most disunited families can occasionally, briefly come together.

The Park Theatre, to Sept 20; parktheatre.co.uk

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