What is the source of human behaviour? Are there God-given moral values? Or are we ruled by our genetic impulses? That is the question lurking behind Hugh Whitemore's new play; but it says a lot about this slow-burning, if ultimately engrossing, piece that the big issue is only articulated at the very end of the evening.
For much of the time Whitemore offers us a gradually unfolding mystery. The Preeces - Henry and Angela - move from London to rural Gloucestershire: he is a redundant executive, she is his tight-lipped wife. They befriend Alexander and Joanna Barley: a pedagogic teacher and his fey spouse. Henry is working on a book about the social history of pre-war gramophone records. Joanna becomes his secretary. They start a passionate, clandestine affair. Two months later Angela goes off to London for the day and signally fails to return. What exactly has happened?
Like John Hopkins in Next of Kin - which Harold Pinter directed at the National - or Antonioni in L'Avventura, Whitemore uses a mysterious disappearance as a source of moral enquiry. And in the second half he raises all manner of intriguing issues about the inequality of passion, the inability to understand a lifelong partner, the contest between an innate and a self-invented morality.
Eventually I was gripped. But Whitemore unwittingly reveals the limitations of this kind of conventional linear storytelling: you have to put up with a good deal of narrative padding in the first half to get to the meaty ideas in the second.
I believe drama these days is getting quicker, sharper, shorter as audiences anticipate information more readily. But, within its chosen terms, Whitemore's play works well. He also, through the character of Henry, catches precisely the way a momentary surrender to impulse leads to total disintegration; and few actors are better than Stephen Moore at conveying a rueful bewilderment in the face of onrushing events.
The women are less well drawn but Gemma Jones's adulterous Joanna plausibly suggests a rural dominie's wife surprised by passion. David Horovitch's Alexander meanwhile catches exactly the painful apprehension of cuckoldry and Ken Drury's philosophical Inspector Poole is clearly a close cousin to Priestley's Inspector Goole.
A disquieting play. A neat production by Robin Lefevre. I just wish Mr Whitemore had introduced his key ideas earlier instead of allowing all the goals to be scored in the second half.
