What keeps a play alive? Often, I suspect, it is something unresolved or contradictory in its content. By strict logic David Hare's The Secret Rapture, first seen in 1988 and dealing with the psychology of Thatcherism, should by now be a bit passé. But in Joanna Read's highly welcome Salisbury revival you feel the play survives precisely because Hare is working out his own complex feelings about the interaction between public policy and private behaviour.
Hare presents us with two sisters brought together by the death of their bookselling Gloucestershire father. Marion, a junior minister in Thatcher's government, is brisk, focused and irritated by emotional mess. Isobel, who runs a commercial design firm with her lover, is humane, altruistic and full of a rather testing moral integrity. The problem the two sisters inherit is their youthful stepmother, Katherine - a relentlessly dependent ex-alcoholic full of a blackmailing helplessness. Who is to take her on? Inevitably it is Isobel, who, through her own instinctive charity, eventually loses everything she values.
In one sense, the play has an historical fascination: it reminds us of the greed, intolerance and curious vanity of the Thatcher years when anyone who didn't subscribe to the prevailing ethos was seen as some kind of deviant. In one of the best scenes Marion and her Christian businessman husband display a blithe incredulity at Isobel's ingratitude over the asset-stripping of her firm. But what makes Hare a good dramatist is that his political convictions are often at odds with his moral inquisitiveness. The final scene implies that the Thatcherite Marion, far from being a monster, is capable of redemption. And there is something prickly and disturbing about Isobel's undoubted goodness, which acts on everyone else like an ethical X-ray machine. In short, you don't always quite know where you stand.
My one cavil about Read's Salisbury production is that it sometimes irons out Hare's moral ambivalence and latent romanticism. Helene Kvale's Marion, while physically dashing, is a little too hysterically testy for comfort. The final transcendent moments are muffed, so that I wasn't sure whether Isobel was returning to earth as a ghostly visitant or arriving prematurely for the curtain call. Elsewhere Niamh Daly's Isobel has exactly the right quality of disquieting virtue and there is first-rate support from Louise Yates as the attention-demanding, witch-like Katherine, Richard Bacon as Isobel's devoted, marginalised lover and Simon Coury as Marion's devout husband, who unavailingly tries to reconcile Christianity and naked capitalism. But that is just one of the escalating contradictions that keeps Hare's play about private and public values theatrically alive.
Until February 10. Box office: 01722-320333.
