Mistaken identity makes for absorbing dramatic material. Whether it is the confusingly cloned sons who populate Caryl Churchill’s A Number or the jumbled twins in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, there is something about characters who aren’t who they say they are – or aren’t sure who they are meant to be – that sets playwrights’ minds racing. Perhaps that’s inevitable for an artform so concerned with the fine points of impersonation.
Jean Anouilh’s early play on the subject is a fascinating rarity. Debuted in 1937 as The Traveller Without Luggage and based on a real-life case, it concerns a soldier from the first world war who has lost his memory and every trace of his former life. Many families, each desperate to recover a missing son, clamour to claim him as theirs. In Anthony Weigh’s witty, colourful update, we’re not in France but the United States, among the pampered in the Hamptons, in the 1950s. The amnesiac soldier has been recovered from a second-world-war East German prison camp; the baffled authorities have called him “Gene”. But Gene is the long-lost Jack, insist a wealthy family named the Foxes – until discoveries about Jack’s past persuade Gene that perhaps he would rather stay lost.
Director Blanche McIntyre choreographs a riot of illusion and self-delusion, a sort of murder mystery where the victim is alive and well. Some of the funny business is so broad you wonder how they squeezed it into the Donmar; occasionally, too, you wish they lingered on the existential anxiety that underpins the piece, with its needling questions about grief and identity. With a running time of more than two and a half hours, the script might also have benefited from a military short back and sides.
But this is an opportunity to watch some top-rank comic acting, particularly from the Fox family, which offers more prize gargoyles than Jack’s collection of hunting trophies. As Gene, Rory Keenan wears the expression of a man who, invited to look a gift horse in the mouth, acquires a strong urge to run in the other direction – though not into the arms of Katherine Kingsley’s gloriously blowsy Marcee Dupont-Dufort (“you do say the ‘t’!”), who is only too keen to use him as social collateral.
Perhaps the real battle for honours is between Siân Thomas’s Mrs Fox and Fenella Woolgar’s dipsomaniac daughter-in-law, Valerie. As Jack’s mother, Thomas offers a masterclass in imperious maternal froideur, a woman who would rather be consorting with her shrink than developing a relationship with her son. Hyperventilating with ardour for the stranger in their midst, Woolgar manages to balance cold-eyed manipulation with a genuine note of despair. Amnesia might be preferable to being clasped to the bosom of a family like this.
• At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 16 April.
