What a left-field delight this first-ever staging of a Barbara Pym novel proves to be. Adapted by Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Pym’s 1977 story is a bittersweet, crisply funny study of four lonely office workers, two of them women staring at the maw of enforced retirement.
Not the stuff of high drama, you’d think, and you’d be right. But Pym, Harvey and director Dominic Dromgoole weave a compelling miniature tapestry from the emotional evasions and thwarted intimacies of a quartet living lives (as Thoreau put it) “of quiet desperation”. The play is also a snapshot of 70s London, of food coupons, £20,000 semis and Van der Valk on the telly. And it furnishes superb roles for four character actors of a certain age.
