Mrs Affleck

Synopsis

I know. No country matters. Not in the kitchen. Not on a Sunday. Not in England. I want things how they were...My perfect poet... 1944, one afternoon in London - on the floor, every last undiluted drop of you. After six lonely weeks with nobody but her crippled little boy for company, Rita Affleck, wealthy, beautiful and consumed by jealous love, welcomes home her husband Alfred. But, far from the passionate reunion she so craves, there is only torment as Alfred’s possessive half-sister arrives, and he announces his great revelation. Samuel Adamson’s play takes Ibsen’s Little Eyolf as the inspiration for a passionate and tragic tale of obsessive love, set in 1950s England.

Our Review:

28 January 2009

Samuel Adamson’s new play is set on the Kent coast in 1955, quite specifically, says the author in a programme note, a few days before Anthony Eden’s election, a few months before “Rock Around the Clock” and a year before the Suez crisis.

The play itself name-checks National Service, television programmes of the day, the poetry of Robert Browning and T S Eliot, King Lear, the watery suicide of Virginia Woolf, the aftermath of war and the new hope in the New Look, the idealism in the stainless steel kitchen, the immigration of West Indians and their new place in Notting Hill and the health service.

In the middle of all this, Mrs Affleck herself, Rita, played with shattering iciness by Claire Skinner, is beating herself up over a disintegrating marriage to a seriously disturbed war veteran and blocked writer, Alfred Affleck (Angus Wright), a situation triggered by the death of their crippled son Oliver (Wesley Nelson shares the role...

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Latest User Review

joesmith - 14 February 2009:

Oh dear what a very long boring night. The updating simply doesn't work and the contemporary references just get silly. The filmic direction is badly misconceived and I agree with David Baxter, that Ms Elliott should concentrate more on the text, and also stop trying to outdo that other (more talanted) lady director. I also hugely enjoyed the set change in the interval but what a clunky hassle it was, you'd think the design could have been a lot simpler and consequently, perhaps, more effective. The actors all worked very hard....

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