The octopus of Dodie Smith’s play’s title is family “from whose tentacles we never quite escape” as her character Nicholas Randolph (Billy Howle) is made to say in a toast when four generations of his family gather to celebrate the Golden Wedding Anniversary of his parents, Charles (Malcolm Sinclair) and Dora (Lindsay Duncan). It is a beautiful study of family love, memories, tensions and pleasures in which most of us who have had similar family reunions will find much which they will recognise. It is three hours long if you include the interval but all totally engaging, as it ranges between nostalgia and heartache and how you face up to getting older.
The Randolphs are comfortably off and a little old fashioned. Their house, built by Charles’s grandfather, is big enough to accommodate everyone under the same roof, but it has no electricity, just gaslight and oil lamps, and is heated by log fires. There are some family portraits, but the empty picture frames of Frankie Bradshaw’s set imply something is missing, and has nobody noticed the peeling paper on the nursery ceiling? It is 1938: European history at a danger point. As a smart West End audience attended its Queen’s Theatre première in September 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain was announcing his offer to meet with Herr Hitler.
Eldest son Peter (Nicholas’s dad) is only there in a portrait; he was killed in the Great War, but his widow, Edna (Pandora Colin), is there and their son Hugh (Tom Glenister) and his wife Laurel (Syakira Moeladi) with their new baby are there.
Dora and Charles’s eldest daughter Norah is dead too, though her daughter Scrap is there and her dad sends a congratulatory telegram from Singapore. Also returning are their other daughters Hilda (Jo Herbert), who has made a successful business career in advertising, and Margery (Amy Morgan) with husband Kenneth (Dharmesh Patel), who has an eye for the ladies, and their children Bill and Flouncy. Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane}, Dora’s favourite daughter, arrives too, returning home after a seven-year absence. Then there is Belle (Kate Fahy), who I think is Charles’s sister-in-law and was once Dora’s rival to marry him. Dora won Charles, but she’s still very catty about her.
You are probably beginning to lose count, but there are staff too: a cook and housemaids, all seemingly live-in, and Fenny (Bessie Carter), whom Dora calls her 'companion': Dora’s happily married; does she needs one? But this was a different world.
With so many people to engage attention, there isn’t much room for plot, but Fenny provides one thread, for, as is obvious to everyone except the man himself, she is in love with Nicholas. Cynthia provides another strand: what was she doing in Paris that stopped her from crossing the channel? Dora wants explanations.
In what is very much ensemble piece that Emily Burns's direction keeps buzzing with activity even as the stage revolves between rooms of a house which seems part of the story, but every character is delivered in detail. Outstanding is Bessie’s Carter efficient and capable Fenny, admired by everyone, who suddenly disintegrates, matched by Howle’s likeable but emotionally blind Nicholas. We see beneath the surface of Kate Fahy’s Belle, the insecurity that Bethan Cullinane’s Cynthia tries to hide and the gentle care with which Malcolm Sinclair gives Charles.
At the centre of everything is Lindsay Duncan’s Dora, charming and bitchy, irritating and loveable all at the same time, insisting that people stay with her then instantly sending them off on some chore. She gives a peerless performance that provides much of the laughter in a production that is full of it, though the shadows cast by the flames in the fireplace may be an ominous reminder of what is going on in the wider world.