Today, William Somerset Maugham is best known as a novelist and short story writer. A century ago, when The Circle was written, he was also one of the country’s most popular playwrights.
Having completed a successful tenure at Jermyn Street, Tom Littler opens his account as Artistic Director at the Orange Tree with a frivolous, sub-Wildean family drama with a few choice aphorisms and some, but not all that many, hidden depths.
A strong cast is led by three top-notch actors all of whom have now reached the veteran stage. They form a strange ménage à trois. Thirty years before the action takes place in the aftermath of the Great War, Kitty (one of the great beauties of her day) played by Jane Asher had been happily married to Clive Francis’s Clive, and an ambitious politician.
He, in turn, had worked as parliamentary private secretary to his best friend and son’s godfather, Lord Hughie Porteous, Nicholas Le Prevost portraying a man who was generally regarded as a future prime minister.
Everything changed when Kitty and Hughie eloped, scandalously leaving Clive to become an elderly but happy roué as we enter the fray awaiting an uncomfortable meeting between the trio.
It soon becomes apparent that Clive might enjoy ineffectually conniving, but the glamorous couple of three decades ago had become vacuous and mutually irritating.
The drama is concentrated on the next generation, Peter Ashmore as Kitty and Clive’s dim, dull son Arnold, a politician with a penchant for boring without even realising that he is doing so, and his long-suffering wife of three years, Olivia Vinall relishing the role of Elizabeth.
In a classic case of history repeating itself primarily to drive a drama, Elizabeth falls for her tennis partner, demobbed rubber planter Teddy, a fountain of endearments but as played by Chirag Benedict Lobo acting shouty passion rather than conveying deep feeling.
The longer pre-interval period Is characterised by effortful attempts to get laughs and acting that is too often stylised and manic, losing much sense of the upper-class characters on show.
The 110-minute-long play picks up considerably in the last 40, as the younger trio try to sort themselves out and either avoid or repeat the mistakes of their elders—to find out which it will be necessary to view the play online.
The Orange Tree is to be commended for sharing their work with the world and, although audibility can be an issue with this recording, the cameras do a fine job of conveying the experience of theatre-in-the-round without dizzying the viewing audience too much.