Charlotte Jones’s prizewinning play, to which I gave a cautious welcome on its first appearance at the National in 2001, emerges strongly in Paul Miller’s superb revival. It’s far superior to the earlier, starrier production. Miller reminds us that a piece whose subjects range from astrophysics to apiculture is rooted in the tensions of family life.
Hamlet is the template. Felix, a Cambridge research fellow, returns to his Cotswold family home after his father’s death to find that his mother, Flora, is contemplating re-marriage. The irony is that, while the unhappy Felix’s personal life is fragmenting, he is seeking a supersymmetry that will unite quantum mechanics and gravity.
Science is only part of the fabric of this play about families. There is even an Ayckbourn-like alfresco lunch that shows how mealtimes are a source of mayhem: not only does the attempted reconciliation between Felix and his putative stepfather backfire but a guest who originally seemed a comic figure – a Christian solitary called Mercy – becomes pivotal. The moment when Mercy, in attempting to say grace, reveals the emotional confusion of herself and everyone else becomes, in Selina Cadell’s performance, one of the best pieces of acting you will see anywhere.
All the performances are perfectly in key. Jonathan Broadbent plays Felix as a man steeped in theoretical science but unable to cope with life, Belinda Lang brings out the cruelty of his appearance-obsessed mother and – even if I find it hard to credit she would contemplate marriage to a loud-mouthed vulgarian – Paul Bradley plays her neighbour with the right lascivious bombast. Simon Daw’s garden set also suggests a Cotswold Eden filled not only with bees but with hidden serpents.
• At Orange Tree, Richmond, until 14 April. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
