The Snail House
Hampstead Theatre
**
Sir Richard Eyre is an esteemed director who has run the National Theatre, brilliantly adapted Ibsen, and helmed movies such as Iris and Notes on a Scandal.
Lockdown moved him to write his first play in his late 70s, dealing with weighty themes of class, personal responsibility, and inter-generational miscommunication. Sad to relate it's a muddled bore-fest stacked with unsympathetic one-note characters, and disconnected arguments that leaves you wishing someone had been tougher on this Knight of the stage - or at least that someone else had directed it.
Neil (Vincent Franklin) is a celebrated doctor and pandemic health advisor, celebrating his birthday, and general rise to success from working class origins with a swanky dinner in his son's former private school. Tim Hatley's panelled design evokes a bastion of privilege with headmasters staring down as low-paid caterers dress the table - including garrulous, irreverent Irishwoman Wynona, (Megan McDonnell) and British-Nigerian Florence (Amanda Bright) nursing a long held grudge against the paediatrician.
The party happens off stage, but pre and post dinner, Neil's family are at war; cheated on, gas-lit wife Val (Eva Pope); Gay son Hugo (Patrick Walshe McBride) a brittle, drawling Tory spad; and shrill eco-warrior Sarah (Grace Hogg-Robinson), who despises her father's values, and hectors him with a list of Gen X-ers' demands against the boomers.
Franklin is an engaging, empathetic performer, but he just isn't given enough to make us care about Neil's journey towards humility as he is beset with confrontations - with his wounded wife, rejected son, angry daughter, and more memorably, the dignified, traumatised mother of a child he wrongly testified was shaken.
He tries to connect his own experience - making a difference in a post-Communist Romanian orphanage - with advice to Sarah about her activism and identity. But none of the play's arguments cohere, and Hogg-Robinson is dealt a lousy hand as an irritating Greta-worshipper.
Even the cringey scene where Sarah and Hugo drunkenly dance to Oasis feels like an old man's idea of what the kids get up to on the dance floor.
The Snail House runs at Hampstead Theatre until October 15. Visit www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2022/the-snail-house/
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here