Dear Octopus
When ‘Dear Octopus’ opened on the West End it was 14 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain was on his way to Germany to appease Hitler and Britain stood uneasily – if not yet knowingly – on the brink of war. Dodie Smith’s comedy about ‘the family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to’ was lightweight stuff for heavyweight times. It was a smash hit. Gielgud starred in it, the King and Queen loved it. It ran for yonks, was revived many times and then sank, like so many other well-made inter-war dramas, into fairly well-deserved oblivion. Eighty-odd years later, the most interesting thing about it is its audacious authoress, Dodie Smith: the London shopgirl and showgirl who really found her stride with fiction, namely ‘The Hundred And One Dalmatians’ and, later, one of the finest and most poignant coming-of-age novels in English, ‘I Capture The Castle’. Smith was a vividly romantic writer with candour, insight and verve, and she absolutely deserves renewed interest, and equal or superior credit to the languid men who dominated the interwar newspaper columns. But this classy but stolid revival of a soapy period comedy isn't going to make her case clear. The action, such as it is, opens in the entrance hall of a slightly peeling family pile, painted a sad arsenic green by designer Frankie Bradshaw. A family is gathering for the golden wedding celebration of mater and pater Dora and Charles (Lindsay Duncan and Ma