Best known for movies such as Atonement and Anna Karenina, Joe Wright has finally got round to directing his first play, and, appropriately, he has chosen Pinero's warm-hearted tribute, written in 1898, to the theatrical medium itself. But, while it makes a perfectly amiable evening, Wright can't help pushing Pinero's faithful re-creation of a past theatrical age to the edge of caricature.
Pinero's play deals with class, change and the enduring power of theatre. It starts by showing Rose Trelawny, the darling of 1860s Sadler's Wells, quitting the stage to marry into the gentry. But once ensconced in Cavendish Square, where she's very much on trial with her fiance's grandfather and great-aunt, she's appalled by the stifling tyranny of upper-class life. Sacrificing her lover, she goes back to the boards only to find her talent has evaporated. Her one hope would seem to lie with an emerging playwright, Tom Wrench, who wants to swap the old artifice for a new realism.
Clearly the play is about the inevitability of change, but I think Wright grossly exaggerates the stageyness of the old theatrical order. He starts by having Ron Cook bustling around in drag as a theatrical landlady dusting visibly painted mantelpieces. Where Pinero wrote with kindly affection about the camaraderie of theatrical companies, Wright seems to faintly patronise the characters. And, although Rose later goes on to admit that the oldsters in Cavendish Square were overbearing, she also says they were "real people". You'd never guess it from this production, however, where the civilians seem even more theatrical than the professional actors.
Once Wright stops hitting us over the head with the supposed quaintness of mid-Victorians and trusts what Shaw called the "dainty workmanship" of the later acts, the production settles down and becomes both touching and funny. You sense the cyclical nature of change in the delicious moment when Peter Wight as a well-cured ham announces he's been cast in Wrench's new play as "an old stagey, out-of-date actor": there's a long, pregnant silence before Maggie Steed as his wife tentatively asks, "Will you be able to get near it, James?" And it's hard to resist the scene where Cook, now playing the tyrannical grandfather, lapses into awed reverence when confronted by the sword used by Edmund Kean in Richard III. This makes Pinero's point that the onset of the new has to be accompanied by a celebration of the past.
Patrick Marber has done a certain amount of cutting and pasting of the original text without causing any great damage. Hildegard Bechtler has also come up with a design that mirrors the move from artifice to reality by finally stripping everything away to reveal the Donmar's back wall. And, when not driven by Wright to "act" in inverted commas, the cast does a good job. Amy Morgan suggests the waif-like quality of Rose stranded between two worlds; Susannah Fielding lends a go-getting rival an impish seductiveness; and there are striking contributions from Daniel Mays as a posturing thespian and Daniel Kaluuya as the harbinger of the new movement based on the dramatist Tom Robertson. It's a charming play, but given a slightly over-strenuous production here as if Wright is trying to assert his theatrical credentials.
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