Well, blow me down with a feather – Harold Brighouse's 100-year-old northern parlour comedy is a right little charmer. It borrows from all those fairytales in which the younger, unappreciated son wins out over his thrusting elder brother to gain the hand of the princess. Sentimental? Certainly. Improbable? Without doubt. Old fashioned? Indisputably. But there is something here about the importance of kindness and the underdog winning that makes the audience exude sighs of contentment in the latter stages of Greg Hersov's beautifully judged revival.
It's no surprise that this is the third time in 35 years that the Exchange has produced this comedy, while in that time Brighouse's more famous Hobson's Choice has only made one appearance. Virginia (Kelly Price, good) is the rich young woman sent to convalesce with her less well-off country cousins, the Munnings; she's a woman who knows her own mind and picks the right man for herself. He is not the man favoured by Mrs Munning, a hatchet-faced widow, who sees that a marriage between Virginia and her eldest son, Paul, might revive the family's ailing catering business. The tight-fisted Paul is the apple of his mother's eye, while her youngest son, Zack, is dismissed as lazy.
Brighouse writes unexpectedly forthright heroines, and in the brittle Mrs Munning (neatly played by Polly Hemingway) he gives an indication of what they might become when curdled with disappointment and avarice. But in Zack he has created a refreshingly unexpected hero, too. Zack is overweight, indolent, and lacking in personal hygiene, but he makes the world a better place. It's a difficult role to carry off, but Justin Moorhouse manages it beautifully, so that we see the swan lurking under the Bolshevik beard. It's a preposterous happy-ever-after tale, but one that should melt the most cynical heart.
