Review: Forty Years On (Chichester Festival Theatre)

It must have seemed like a brilliant coup to cast Richard Wilson, best known for his incarnation of many curmudgeons, as the grumpy retiring headmaster in Alan Bennett's first play Forty Years On.

After all, the imperious John Gielgud played the role at its premiere in 1968, lending his old-school grandeur to Bennett's new style satire of a minor English public school on the South Downs, staging a pageant which looks back on England's glorious past.

But Gielgud was 64 and in good health. Wilson is 80 and recovering from a heart attack last August. You can admire his chutzpah for going on, and he can still deliver a withering put down with the best of them – "I am all in favour of free expression as long as it is kept under control." But for the most part, he is reading his lines off the book and off various bits of paper, and he is occasionally unsteady on his feet.

As an audience member, his sheer frailty and slowness worried me. It is not a performance so much as a feat of endurance and I wonder if this central uncertainty has had an effect on the rest of the cast too. For whatever reason, line after line and joke after joke lands flat as a pancake as the performers struggle to make a play that is already unwieldy spring into life. Alan Cox, playing the Headmaster's more liberal successor, and Jenny Galloway as Matron occasionally breathe vitality into proceedings, but the humour is often laboured and badly timed.

Some of the fault for this must lie with director Daniel Evans, normally so reliable. As if in compensation, he has lavished music (courtesy of music director Tom Brady) and a 52-strong local community chorus of boys on proceedings. They are terrific, performing Naomi Said's slick and subtle choreography with synchronised aplomb. Lez Brotherston's set is a wonder too, putting a working organ at the centre of an oak-panelled surround with leaded glass conjuring the school hall.

Underneath all the frantic activity, the lineaments of Bennett's play lie buried. Only it isn't really a drama as such, more a series of revue sketches, an interesting mix of nostalgia for a Britain that once was and despair at the country it is becoming. It is, like all Bennett's work, more tough-minded and more left-wing than it at first appears.

At the time it opened, its skits on TE Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Ottoline Morrell and the like, and its questioning of the comfy assumptions of post-war Britain must have seemed radical and refreshing. Now the characters Bennett holds up to the light are as lost as 18th century history – their significance and beliefs a mystery to a young audience today.

This opens up fascinating questions about contemporary Britain's relationship with its history which a more confident, less cluttered production might have exposed and explored. Certainly, right at the close, when a set of screened images bring the timeline bang up to date, there's a hint of what attracted Evans to the play in the first place. In the scene that closes the first act, too, where Wilson, in shadow, reads the story of the gilded youth who went off to die in the First World War, there's a hint of vision that might have been.

But for the most part, this is the dampest of squibs, and a disappointing start to Evans' tenure as artistic director at Chichester.

Forty Years On runs at Chichester Festival Theatre until 30 May.