FringeReview UK 2024
Dear Octopus
National Theatre, London
Genre: Comedy, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
At first sight this is a revival of a grand well-made hit. It’s shot through with modernity though. No wonder: it’s 1938. At the most poignant moment of Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus NT Lyttelton directed by Emily Burns till March 30th, there’s a brief shuddering glance at a play from a year earlier: J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways.
Mother and daughter reflect on the way time speeds up. ”I wonder if that would link up with modern time theories?” reflects Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane). To which mother Dora (Lindsay Duncan) ripostes ”I never could make head nor tail of those. It’s all in the bible – ‘That which hath been is now, and that which is to be hath already been.’” Dora’s unconsciously referencing T. S. Eliot’s then-emerging Four Quartets too; like the Priestley, and read up by Paris-dwelling Cynthia, Smith’s influenced by J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. Like Priestley too, though in a muted way, this explains some of the allure of Smith’s greatest play.
Two hours 45 starts slowly but you feel Smith’s arc move with its casual, supremely naturalist conversation to moments where time stands still and Cynthia, Fenny and Nicholas, as well as Dora, know it and seize their day. Outstanding revival.
Written by Dodie Smith, Directed by Emily Burns, Set and Costume Designer Frankie Bradshaw, Lighting Design Oliver Fenwick, Sound Designer Tingying Dong, Composer Nico Muhly, Music Director David Shrubsole, Etiquette Lucy Cullingford
Casting Bryony Jarvis-Taylor and Naomi Downham, Company Voice Work Shereen Ibrahim and Liz Fint, Associate Sound Designer Joel Price, Staff Director Julia Levai, Producer Fran Miller, Production Manager Heather Doole.
Till March 30th
Review
At first sight this is a revival of a grand well-made hit. It’s shot through with modernity though. No wonder: it’s 1938. At the most poignant moment of Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus NT Lyttelton directed by Emily Burns till March 30th, there’s a brief shuddering glance at a play from a year earlier: J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways.
Mother and daughter reflect on the way time speeds up. ”I wonder if that would link up with modern time theories?” reflects Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane). To which mother Dora (Lindsay Duncan) ripostes ”I never could make head nor tail of those. It’s all in the bible – ‘That which hath been is now, and that which is to be hath already been.’” Dora’s unconsciously referencing T. S. Eliot’s then-emerging Four Quartets too; like the Priestley, and read up by Paris-dwelling Cynthia, Smith’s influenced by J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. Like Priestley too, though in a muted way, this explains some of the allure of Smith’s greatest play.
It celebrates the benign tentacles of family from which “we never quite escape nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to” – voiced in a closing speech by Nicholas (Billy Howle), youngest of six children. And he’s now found out how much, because there’s a thread of infuriatingly unrequited love.
The family gather for the golden wedding of Dora and Charles (Malcolm Sinclair), who’s quite convinced he wasn’t really cut out for an MP or authorship. Despite the imminent arrival of Dora’s American-dwelling sister Belle (Kate Fahy) who still thinks she could have made a great man of him.
Just 35, Nicholas is already thrice a grand-uncle: two of three siblings who produced children are dead. The eldest Peter killed in the war, leaves stylish vinegary widow Edna (Pandora Colin) who seems to prevent Nicholas finding another woman, and her children 23-year-old Hugh (Tom Glennister) and wife Laurel (Syakira Moeladi) and unseen baby (in the fun trailer christened Tim).
Next-youngest Cynthia’s twin Nora died two years ago, leaving precocious, sensitive and bereft Scrap (Serena Guo on this occasion); and a Singapore-based absent father. Surviving eldest at 42 is career-property-dealer Hilda (Jo Herbert, giving vestigial warmth to a nervous, exasperated, thwarted life not explored in the play); and Margery (Amy Morgan, here radiating her happiness over her patronising siblings) content with Kenneth (Dharmesh Patel), getting fatter to everyone’s chagrin.
They sport their two children: skirling imp Bill (Ashwin Sakthivel on this occasion) who pushes action forward and comments as wryly as Scrap. And robust Flouncy (Ariela Ekins-Green on this occasion) similarly quick. She uses huggable teddy-bear Symp as a cushion.
To the 14-strong broken spine of parents, surviving siblings and their children there’s just three others. Nanny Patching (Celia Nelson) and Gertrude the parlourmaid (Natalie Thomas) are given virtually nothing to do: Smith can’t negotiate or take interest in class the way contemporaries like Priestley did. Hugh and Laurel have little to do but act joyously.
But Smith does accord Fenny (Bessie Carter), Dora’s Companion, as much agency as Cynthia, with a seven-year mysterious past. And it’s their feelings above all that interest us.
Carter’s transformation from a shy glowing, to being cast down, through her blossoming on a dance night and finally breaking through all the carapace of position and class to express her feelings is one of the two or three riveting threads of the work.
It’s plain to all that super-coping Fenny, just 29, who loves the family she never had, is in love with advertising hot-shot and broadcaster Nicholas. Who doesn’t know it and acts like a benign Bertram to a besotted Helena. And for similar reasons. A 2019 Bath/Jermyn Street production of All’s Well That Ends Well portrayed a tender sibling relationship between two who grew up together.
But whilst the Westermark Effect – a sexually neutering accommodation – worked on Bertram, it didn’t on Helena. Something of that operates here, explaining the crass actions of kind, waspishly witty but never cruel Nicholas. That is, till feelings are really provoked.
Elsewhere tensions between Colin’s officious, interfering Edna and sisters Hilda (who loves a rage whilst it lasts and regrets its passing), peace-making Margery and clever, emotionally fraught Cynthia explodes in one scene. And each character, bar Nurse (except briefly) and Gertrude (not at all bar a cameo of discomfiture) are given duets and swirls of attention. One pair move away and a trio emerge in either drawing room, dining room or in the second act, nursery.
The second act revolves round a dance where the sisters push Fenny to party-mode and away from Nicholas’s obliviousness. Patel’s Kenneth, instructed to flirt, goes too far and boisterously kisses Fenny offstage, provoking Nicholas’s jealousy.
Nicholas is played with increasing anxiety by Howle moving expertly from warm heedlessness to realisation and shocked feeling. Sinclair’s urbane Charles – so urbane you can hear a Bentley purring – has a chance to show Fahy’s watchful and sophisticated Belle how mistaken she is in her wondrous preservation: each character’s given agency.
Dora’s benign dictatorship is never guyed but it comes close. “I have no favourites. I just like Cynthia most.” Or in casually referencing Belle’s two husbands Bill and … she’s reminded, Elmer: “How I wish they were both here now” she adds before even she realises she can’t say that. And admitting after seeming so liberal about Cynthia, of course she’s shocked.
But it’s first a moment where the family gather for a song with Duncan and Cullinane that explodes in tears: and that conversation with her daughter who’s about to leave, that proves pivotal and moving.
Cullinane throughout the play peels just a wisp of vulnerability and grief: about herself, her dead twin, the family. She’s the more overwhelming for orchestrating Cynthia’s restraint and release.
That, and the final moments between Nicholas and Fenny – instrumentally it’s Charles, not Dora who strips away Nicholas’ illusions. Smith ensures Charles is not entirely redundant, though Duncan bestrides every room she’s in: sometimes her obliviousness is wielded with deadly precision.
Frankie Bradshaw’s set and costumes all shade into green: even costumes from green through turquoise to the colour of the set itself: eggshell green in the revolve featuring drawing room and nursery, then with a drop-down wall, a dining room. Filled with comfy detail mainly mahogany, the whole is deliciously solid.
As is Oliver Fenwick’s unobtrusive lighting of all kinds of day, and Nico Muhly’s music in a different style from much else he’s written, seems as ambient as rain. There’s gulphs of quiet in Tingying Dong’s way of gusting partying in, laughter in the next room.
Two hours 45 starts slowly but you feel Smith’s arc move with its casual, supremely naturalist conversation to moments where time stands still and Cynthia, Fenny and Nicholas, as well as Dora, know it and seize their day. Outstanding revival.
