Anthony Head

Semi-detached chaps

Rebecca Tyrell reviews Otherwise Engaged at the Criterion and Pillars of the Community at The National Theatre

Otherwise Engaged, Simon Gray’s 30-year-old play revived at the Criterion and starring Richard E. Grant, is about a man who has almost 100 per cent successfully detached himself from all that goes on around him. He is as unaffected as it is possible to be by other people’s problems, whether his brother’s, his friend’s, his lodger’s, and even his wife’s. Richard E. Grant seems suddenly incapable of the irony required for his role

Simon Hench is someone Gray and his boozing, smoking 1970s peers would no doubt have liked to have been, if to emulate him hadn’t meant being borderline sociopathic. He is a brilliant creation, a selfish, mischievous ironist. Unfortunately for this production, Richard E. Grant seems suddenly incapable of the irony required.

He has done it before by the shovel-load - he did it brilliantly in Withnail and I - but he just can’t get a handle on it here. Lines meant to be faux-naïf or provocative are delivered wide-eyed and deadpan: there’s nothing knowing about Grant’s performance.

There are, though, many good things to be enjoyed in Simon Curtis’s neat, compact production. The dialogue-free opening scene is a treat as, comfy in his creamy 1970s London sitting-room, Hench, a successful publisher, prepares to spend an afternoon alone with his brand new Wagner LP. He sinks into his leather sofa, arranges an expression of bliss on his face and drinks in the music as if it were the finest wine known to humanity.

You just know he is going to be disturbed. First up is the chippy lodger (Liam Garrigan); then comes the older brother, Stephen (Peter Wight), a magnificently hot and stressed under-achiever with five children, a dull wife and a big worry that he won’t get the assistant headmaster’s job he is up for.

An old soak in a cravat (Anthony Head) pitches up next, closely followed by his troublesome girlfriend (Amanda Ryan), who, left alone with Hench, proceeds to remove her top and conduct 10 minutes’ conversation entirely topless - a scene which seems more shocking now than it would have done in the weird 1970s.

Hench is heroically unmoved, as sometimes is the audience; there are moments in the first half that taper into nothing in particular. But it all picks up again with the arrival of Strapley (David Bamber), who was at school with Hench and has come to accuse the publisher of sleeping with his fiancée. It is only when his wife arrives home with a nasty surprise that Hench is finally forced to show a flicker of interest in life beyond the Wagner LP. But it is not long before he is back on the sofa with that look of horribly beatific bliss.

One hundred years earlier, in the 1870s, Henrik Ibsen wrote Pillars of the Community, a play about another emotionally detached man. The difference is that Karsten Bernick (Damian Lewis), a wealthy Norwegian industrialist, is protecting himself from scandal and ruin rather than mere inconvenient intrusion.

At the beginning of Samuel Adamson’s seductive new version of the play at the Lyttelton, everything looks as it should according to respectable Norwegian society. Bernick, whom Lewis plays rather in the style of a scandal-dodging, back-to-basics Tory MP, is behind closed doors with his male business associates planning the building of a railway through the seaport where he already runs a successful shipping business. His wife Betty (Geraldine Alexander) is hosting a meeting of the Society for the Morally Wounded, which has an all-female membership including Una Stubbs as the fantastically gossipy Mrs Holt. They sit around the family table, sewing clothes for fallen women while being read to by a schoolteacher.

But black sheep are on their way home, threatening revelations that would look "terrible on the escutcheon".

"For the love of God, don’t mention the half-sister, Lona Hessell," says Una Stubbs. "She sings for her supper in drinking dens." And sure enough, in the wake of a travelling circus whose presence in the town causes the shutters to be closed lest the women should see, along comes Lona (Lesley Manville). With her is Johan (Joseph Millson), her half-brother with whom she fled to America 15 years ago amid rumours of his affair with an actress and the theft of a pot of Bernick money.

The plot really does thicken quite rapidly after this but suffice to say that what is gradually revealed brings about the humiliation of Bernick, the upstanding pillar of the community. The story ends, as it rarely does in real life but so often does in Ibsen plays, with liberation.

With its women in musty-coloured dresses in sepia settings, this is a beautiful production to look at. But while the first hour and a half of the play is rich with dry humour and clever cynicism about constraining social values, the second, though full of gripping drama, does rather lose it and there are moments of almost Hollywood-style schmaltz.