Christopher Luscombe’s revival of JB Priestley’s 1938 play is terribly cosy. The crack cast pull off the material with comic aplomb, but even they can’t really persuade you that there’s much point to it all. Priestley is in jocular mood here, far removed from the social-reforming zeal of ‘An Inspector Calls’. He still takes swipes at snobbery and pretension. But he restores the characters to their comfortable status quo at the drama’s conclusion, without any of them having had to endure much more than a little temporary anxiety.
It’s 1908, and three prosperous, ageing Yorkshire couples gather to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of their weddings, all of which took place on the same morning, at the same rural chapel. But the new young organ-master, regarded as something of an upstart, has discomfiting news: there was an irregularity in the services, and they were never, in fact, legally married. This revelation occasions embarrassment, as well as a reassessment of relationships to which some parties had rather joylessly resigned themselves. It’s slight, and it takes all the efforts of the familiar faces on stage to animate it.
Most enjoyably, an aridly imperious Maureen Lipman finds her authority unexpectedly assailed by Sam Kelly as her mutinous husband and Michele Dotrice rediscovers the fun-loving creature she might have been, had matrimony not intervened. They make you chuckle; they don’t make you care.