So Long Life (tour)

Peter Nichols is a good playwright but not a great one. His work varies in quality. The best, like Joe Egg (1967) and Privates on Parade (1977), draw directly on his own experience, and the central character in his latest play So Long Life is modelled partly on his grandmother.

A dysfunctional family gathers in Bristol to celebrate the birthday of its 85- year-old matriarch, Alice. In worldly terms, the family has been successful. There’s Greg, the architect son (Paul Shelley) with his social-worker wife (Liz Crowther), Wendy the television-presenter daughter (Cheryl Campbell) with a toy-boy (Matthew Wait) in tow, and grand-daughter Imogen (Melanie Ramsay) a university lecturer. All the characters are complex and rounded and each has his or her moment centre-stage. The acting is impeccable.

But it’s Stephanie Cole as the ill-educated Alice who dominates the stage. Although her struggle with the notoriously difficult Bristol accent is only partly successful, she gives a moving portrayal of the complexity of old age – tiresome, playful, manipulative and tragic. At first, you think this is going to be another angst-ridden family dilemma – shall we put mother in a home as she can’t cope and none of us want her? Mother doesn’t want to go and knows a few family secrets she could use to blackmail her offspring.

Such a theme could have been as tedious as an episode of EastEnders, but Nichols easily side-steps it. Stylistically, he regularly freezes the action for Alice to voice her hidden thoughts to the audience as she drifts in and out of sleep. The difficulty of her old age is placed in the context of the much greater tragedy of her whole life, and the problem of the old lady is overtaken by the dilemma posed by the spiritual poverty of the entire family. Writing in 1985, Peter Nichols commented, “All my plays have been about captivity and all the characters are captives”. No-one in this new play breaks that mould.

And yet it doesn’t quite work. It’s a serious play with plenty of funny lines. Some are jokes, but mostly we are laughing at the outspokenness and cussed cunning of an old woman. It’s with this humour of recognition that Nichols is most at home. His brief excursions into the problems of incest and drug-dependence are much less convincing. There are too many themes here which co-exist rather than coalesce.

The play has plenty of good ingredients, which somehow don’t quite gel. But Cole manages the final moments of the play so tenderly and beautifully that she almost persuades you they do. So Long Life may not be Nichols at his very best, but it still provides an interesting and enjoyable evening’s entertainment.

Robert Hole (Reviewed at the Theatre Royal Bath)