Farewell to the Theatre

After the heroically uncommercial endeavour that was Katie Mitchell's production of Simon Stephens's 'The Trial of Ubu', the Hampstead has reverted to the sort of glossily middlebrow form that's become its bread and butter of late.

Veteran US writer Richard Nelson's new play concerns itself with a spell in the life of the Edwardian playwright-director Harley Granville-Barker when, disillusioned with his life and career back in England, he spent some time lecturing at the Williams College in Massachusetts. If that sounds a touch obscure, fret not: Nelson has essentially crafted a very watchable tale of academic intrigue and expat emotional exile in which biographical details are essentialy nice window dressing.

This is not to fault Ben Chaplin's performance as Nelson's imagined Granville-Barker. On the contrary, he's just about the best thing in Roger Michell's production. Witty but never arch, sardonic but always warm, despondent but not self-pitying, Chaplin is infinitely watchable and thoroughly likeable as an artist grappling with his own identity who blunders into the intrigue-laden Williams College English department just as machinations are in place to wreck the career of his genial host Henry (Louis Hilyer).

The production is on its firmest ground in the understated, melancholic scenes in which Granville-Barker and his fellow British exiles in academia give halting voice to how very lost they feel: in America, in their marriages, in a world being slowly swallowed by the Great War. But well observed as it often is, Nelson doesn't really go anywhere with it either, and ducks any hard questions via a shamelessly feel-good ending.

The only out and out bum note is Tara Fitzgerald's shrill performance as a besotted actor-turned-teacher. But it's hard to get overly excited about a polished conversation play that feels like it'd be better suited to a tour of regional receiving houses than a leading new writing theatre.