This well-known play is nothing if not a ‘period piece.’ It specificity is as fixed and immovable as the groaning tables of celebratory food described off-stage. We are in Edwardian Bradford for the silver-wedding party of three prosperous couples, who have ridden the wave of wool-based prosperity to rise from working to middle-class status that they ostentatiously project, whether through grand, overstuffed interiors, conspicuous consumption, Chapel worship and strong disapproval of la-di-da Southerners or any infringements of moral convention. This is ripe material for both comedy, farce and satire, and so it turns out to be once we learn that the foundations of those marriages may not be so secure as they complacently supposed.
Given that this is not a play that can be shifted in time and place, any revival has to find other ways of presenting a fresh take. Tim Sheader and his impressive cast get the basics right by setting a brisk pace and playing the characters with the utmost seriousness in the opening scenes – you have to establish the full weight of the pomposity before you can prick it. But they also open it out in original ways too. It was an excellent idea to have one of the characters begin each act with a music hall song that lightens the mood in period style, with a touch of satire too, that is reminiscent of the use of period music in Oh, What a Lovely War.
Also Peter McKintosh’s set strips things back to be a lot less cluttered than usual – a few overpowering items of furniture set the tone of showy prosperity – and a lurid palette of brown, yellows and purples, together with a steepling aspidistra captures the tone of borderline vulgar opulence. A piano, slightly underused, sits off to the side.
The couples are as well matched in their acting as they are ill-matched by nature. No one does shrivelling scorn and death-star disdain better than Siobhan Finneran, and she is ideal for Maria Helliwell, unused to any kind of opposition or obstacle. Samantha Spiro is similarly impressive as the battle-axe Clara Soppitt, while Sophie Thompson finds an altogether different register for the overlooked Annie Parker. Her fey, wistful yet increasingly assertive performance really comes into its own in her scene with the hen-pecked Herbert Soppitt, where the collapse of accepted order gives a sudden sense of the human possibilities that might have been. Tori Allen-Martin delivers a lively rendition of ‘A little of what you fancy does you good,’ and a cheerful take on Lottie Grady, a unexpected blast from someone’s past.
Among the men there are three carefully distinguished performances, with self-regard and clumsy deceit coming through in Alderman Helliwell (John Hodgkinson), absurd, droning pomposity and meanness from Councillor Parker (Marc Wootton), but a fine-grained integrity peeping out all the time from the down-trodden Herbert Soppitt (Jim Howick).
There are hints too of the more subversive and socially critical aspects of Priestley’s work that he develops in later plays, and the cast give these due emphasis. Janice Connolly, as the charlady Mrs Northrop seizes every opportunity to ridicule those above her in the pecking order once tables are turned; Similarly Gerald, the young Chapel organist facing dismissal at the outset for his relationship with the Helliwell’s niece, Nancy, manages to leverage his own position once the artificial boundaries of class and respectability have been suspended.
Ultimately order is restored, of course, and uncomfortable alternatives banished; but this is through the agency of the broadest comic character in the play, the drunken cameraman Henry Ormonroyd, delightfully played by Ron Cook. His increasingly farcical, slapstick interventions as a lord of misrule culminate, paradoxically, in the discovery of a solution to the disorder which owes everything to him and to Lottie, not to the frayed and fractured Bradford Establishment.
This typically well-made play still works as well as ever in the theatre as pure visual and verbal comedy; but this production does well in bringing out its darker side too, leaving suggestions of how it might, on another day, have been taken in other directions altogether.
Writer: J.B.Priestley
Director: Tim Sheader
Cast: Tori Allen-Martin, Janice Connolly, Ron Cook, Siobhan Finneran, John Hodgkinson, Jim Howick, Reuben Joseph, Rowan Robinson, Smantha Spiro, Sophie Thompson, Marc Wootton, Leo Wringer
Until 7 February 2026
2 hrs with interval
Photo Credit: Johan Persson