FringeReview UK 2026

Atonement

Chichester Festival Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Translation

Venue: Chichester Festival Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong?” How did this scene happen, and in a real sense, where? That’s when a lie has so catastrophic an effect on a pair of lovers, it takes you a lifetime to answer. Especially if your imagination has to end what it began. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement premieres at Chichester Festival Theatre directed by Adam Penford till June 20.

This is a Chichester Festival production at the theatre’s gleaming best. Hampton was also responsible for the 2007 film adaptation. Here he’s distilled this stage version with a near-ideal clarity and compactness, pacily directed by Penford. Coming in at two hours including interval it’s both rethought and presented with a few Russian-doll reveals, including those of the original novel. Above all though it works theatrically, and allows most of the emotions to land. That’s particularly true of the second act where a very slightly ruminant first (which doesn’t seem to drag) gives on to the concertina’d catastrophes of war, displacement, and time-jumps.

The story’s one of the most familiar of this century. It’s set first in a country house in during the blazing summer of 1935, prior to a party. 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Isabella Dempster)), both highly intelligent and entitled, is trying to rehearse her first play with cousin Lola Quincey (Yanexi Enriquez) and Lola’s pesky twin brothers aged nine. It doesn’t go well. Her elder sister Cecilia (Miriam Petche, by turns tense, angry and tender) down from Cambridge is worried her feelings for family protégé  Robbie Turner (Jasper Talbot) will show. He’s just got an English starred first also at Cambridge; but now wants to study medicine.

But Robbie’s also the housekeeper’s son and just gardens the grounds till ready. It’s compounded by his sending the wrong note to Cecilia, a fantasy. Whilst this is resolved others become of aware of it. Talbot ratchets up class assurance from Cambridge with a brittle undercurrent of alienation and precarity.

Both part of the furniture and patronised, Talbot’s Robbie is nevertheless already far from his roots. Class authority serves him later in France, yet his hurt suppurates when alone with Cecilia. It’s where Petche can memorably flame out both Cecilia’s passion and fury at Robbie, and latterly on his behalf.

The evening’s events are compounded by lightweight brother Leon Tallis (an admiring, heedless James Backway) bringing a rising smug young tycoon Paul Marshall (an oleaginous, entitled Tom Chapman) to dinner. Events twist and turn viral much like the set’s spiral staircase; which looms upstage-centre like a Fate. Whilst mother Emily Tallis (velvet-gloved but watchful Debra Gillett) attempts order on a brittle dinner, first Briony, then the twins go missing. In the mélée of search Lola is sexually assaulted. By the time Robbie’s found them safe everything is altered, and for Robbie and Cecilia most of all.

The second act alternates 1940 action in a trek towards Dunkirk around Robbie, with nursing on the home front. This is where Briony, like Cecilia has become an efficient nurse. Cecilia isn’t talking to any of her family. Robbie’s kept in hope by her letters.

By this time it’s clear Dempster delivers in a standout of gawk, stubbornness and latterly seething self-hatred, sheathed in a nurse’s iron discipline. Briony’s given up her place at Cambridge to nurse, which she’s patently good at: more so than her anxious boy-obsessed  colleague Fiona Amery (Enriquez again, leaving the tremulous fragility of Lola for vulnerable if fun-loving Fiona). Briony’s also nearly managed to get a story into Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. The emblematic typewriter sustains her.

Gillett reappears as a formidable matron. And Backway as Airman Young whose shrapnel wounds echo Robbie’s, did Briony but know it. It’s one of those motifs Hampton uses to point up McEwan’s counterpoint of themes. Others involve Briony nursing a gravely ill Frenchman (Gabin Kongolo, earlier a downcast Hardman the handyman) whose need induces an imaginative leap from Briony. In a brisk script this slightly jars. Yet another slides what might be a pivotal reveal from 1934. Theatrical, involving leaps, it seeds an obsession. It’s so brief and discrete you wonder how to take it. These scenes seem to semaphore plot-points to those who know the novel.

The 1940 Dunkirk scenes are signalled within the stage’s declivities and bar projection little needs doing: it’s a miracle of economy and Kate Waters’ scaling of action sequences. Chapman reappears as shrewd Corporal Nettle deferring to Robbie as a “toff” (able to speak French for instance, translated by Goulding’s projection) though a private, a soubriquet Robbie denies. Whilst Nicholas Bailey, earlier a calm Doctor McLaren, now takes on the stronger role of nervous if bullish Corporal Frank Mace.

Other parts are crisply projected with ensemble moments. Natasha Magigi impresses as Robbie’s mother Grace, furious at wrongs, as Cecilia’s landlady Mrs Jarvis and finally as older Briony’s warm yet wary editor Tessa Scott: a happy shift from the original’s Tom. Jonathan Oliver’s quietly adamantine Police Inspector gives away to a 1940 Frenchman and one twin, Pierrot, now 73 in the finale: an amiable if sly nod to Master Shallow. The young twins are riotously taken on this occasion by Jacob Isaacs and Felix Kennedy.

Anthony Ward’s costumes, lovingly sourced, centre around that green dress. They’re striking, authentic from couture to khaki. Ward’s superbly versatile set features a cutaway grand house with an upper floor reached by that Deco stairwell twisted like DNA. A foreground working fountain means dripping figures. Libraries and other rooms do brief duty, but its chief feature like the script is compactness and versatility.

Often panels slide shut over the upper floor when Andrzej Goulding’s video projections play over it. More, he designs letters to fall like a typewriter or occasionally handwriting: whether the young Briony’s play, or letters Robbie or Cecilia write, or event dates.

This writing projection hardens finality. Committing to fate is telegraphed, kerning scenes to the memory of paper. Experience is swerved by imagination, further refracted by the act of writing. The set tells us exactly – but subtly – what the themes are; spelling it out slant.

Aideen Malone’s lighting is particularly striking in tenebrous glooms. Elsewhere it lends the set and actors a sheen: crisp as a hyper-realist but Deco-shaded Meredith Frampton painting, from the period. Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s sound and composition insinuates modernity but soon breathes evocation, notably around Elgar’s Nimrod from his Enigma Variations.

Perhaps the most poignant moment, involving this, is the lovers’ meeting in St James’ Park, coded by Goulding’s projection and Malone’s green infusions. Ben Wright’s movement and intimacy direction shows off the way Penford has realised Hampton’s throughlines; everything vectored and driven.

Jessica Turner’s sudden appearance as the 77-year-old Briony of 1999, in particular scenes with Oliver and Magigi, is a stand-alone epilogue with no prelude. It seems frustrating we don’t see Turner perhaps at the opening giving onto her younger self, which might frame the drama. Turner though stamps the older Briony with a consummate finality. It’s a pity it’s so brief. Like the run itself.

There are two tiny eddies where a scene’s positioning raises question-marks. And whilst there’s sometimes too much telegraphing of motifs, climactic scenes work. And lends the whole a swift, remorseless inevitability. The epilogue, retelling fates, is a little muted, with a touch less time to fall than it might. But that’s to quibble. Whatever other verdicts lie out there, this is a quintessence of Atonement, perhaps the finest. One where, in Keats’ phrase, many of the disagreeables found in the novel, somehow evaporate. McEwan here affirms Briony did atone. An iridescent must-see.

Action Consultant Kate Waters, Casting Director Helena Palmer CDG, Voice & Dialect Coach Kay Welch Assistant Director Amy Crighton.

Production Manager Chris Hay, Costume Supervisor Rachel Woodhouse, Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Supervisors Campbell Young Associates, Props Supervisor Lisa Buckley, Tegan Cutts.

Company Stage Manager Elliot Mitchell, DSM Sarah Jenkins, ASMs Blaithin McReynolds, Daisey Vahey.

Head Chaperone Jeanette McAlpine, Chaperones Boo Chapman, Emily McAlpine, Lesley McGovern, House Parent Louis Ling, Tutor Stuart Morris.

Published June 6, 2026June 6, 2026 by Simon Jenner