”4000 Miles”, starring Eileen Atkins and Sebastian Croft, at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre – review

Amy Herzog’s 2011 play must feel it has travelled at least the distance in its title to get to a UK stage. It was all ready to run at the Old Vic as the pandemic broke out, with Eileen Atkins and Timothée Chalamet rehearsed in the leading rules. Three years later, it finally arrives at Chichester with Heartstopper‘s Sebastian Croft replacing Chalamet – but, thank goodness, with Atkins still in situ.

I personally would travel 4,000 miles just to see Atkins perform, and she is undoubtedly the best thing about this imagining of a meeting between Leo, a traumatised 21-year-old who has just cycled across America, and his grandmother Vera, who lives in Greenwich Village surrounded by books and fading memories.

From the moment she greets Leo in the middle of the night, hand clamped across her mouth because she hasn’t put her teeth in, eyes widened in wonder, worry and a certain amount of alarm, Atkins subtly shows how to reveal a lot based on very little.

Her portrait of Vera, indomitably pushing a laundry basket around her apartment, hands fluttering around her head as she struggles to remember words, eyes flashing as she uses sharp humour to bat away her loneliness as “the last of the octagenarians” die off, face watchful and a little melancholy as she tries to weigh up Leo’s mood and intentions, is an exhibition of acting at its finest.

In a play that lacks force and momentum thanks to constant blackouts between scenes and a sense that the text is always reaching for a profundity that it never finds, she discovers an emotional centre of truth that holds everything together. She is also very funny, landing Vera’s often politically incorrect observations and brusque declarations of independence with perfect timing.

Richard Eyre’s direction is perhaps a little too respectful of the apparent insight of Herzog’s play. Rather like Leo, who Croft makes both appealingly idealistic and irritatingly unthinking, it tries to cover a lot of ground about family relations, the changing shape of political debate (Vera’s dead husband was a committed communist), and the abandonment of youthful hopefulness without ever quite getting there.

Lurking beneath its sophisticated surface, beautifully embodied by Peter McKintosh’s cluttered apartment set, is a proper discussion about society, the way the old are left to fend for themselves while the young flounder. The suggestion is that nobody can talk to anyone anymore, but nothing is quite explored.

There’s a sharpness to the writing – and peppy interventions from Nell Barlow’s ex-girlfriend Bec, and Elizabeth Chu as the potential hook-up whose family background in China means the Communist manifesto turns into a mood killer. Yet the play lacks any depth.

Its most compelling scene where Vera listens intently in semi-darkness to Leo’s description of his best friend’s death is made magical by the link between grandmother and grandson and the concentration of their performances. In such moments, when so much passes across Atkins’ mobile, intelligent face, it’s impossible not to be glad that 4000 Miles finally made it to the stage. It is quite simply an opportunity to see one of our great actors at work.