I have been a fan of Elle Knight ever since I saw her as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion In Winter so long ago it was at the old Arts Centre in Beacon Street. I remember also her definitive performance in Separate Tables long before Rattigan became fashionable again.
I rediscovered her later as a director with an unforgettable production of Sarte’s Huis Clos at Middleton Hall and have taken good care since to see as much of her directorial output as I could manage. But with Alan Bennett’s The Old Country she has surpassed even her own stellar standard.
I didn’t know this Bennett play from the seventies, and expected a cute, rather camp and slightly ironic if clever comedy. Instead I was confronted by a work which may be his masterpiece, a theatrical tour de force of audience manipulation in which dawning levels of awareness eventually add up to an ingenious blinkers-off vision of human nature, the ruthlessness of international diplomacy and the sheer banality of treachery,
Stephen Brunton is the top of his game as an actor at present, and in the long and difficult part of Hilary he never missed a beat in keeping the audience guessing about his real thoughts and motivation until the awesomely apprehensive ending of the play.
Adrienne Swallow was quite simply perfect as his normal-seeming wife Bron who, especially in the genteel setting of the George’s ballroom appeared to be as normal as Mrs Dale’s Diary while the truth was something terribly different.
Ian Davies was simply marvellous as the loser at all games who in the end is left holding the literary source-material of fashionable intellectual disaffection, while Melissa Swinnerton was a pearl of a find as the steely, brutalised unknown victim of wars both cold and frozen. Ian Henderson purred his way silkily through a script which mixed the insincerity of international diplomacy with the aphoristic genius of Wilde: “Boys are nothing these days, and memoirs make a mint.”
The Home Counties’ normality of Denise Baker as his anyone-for-tennis wife Veronica gave the play that dreamlike quality of make-believe that left me, at any rate, deliciously disoriented by this devastating theatrical tour de force.
