Elizabeth (Olivia Vinall), the dissatisfied young wife at the heart of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 drama, enters the drawing room holding a copy of Anna Karenina. It’s the kind of detail in Tom Littler’s deft production that speaks, well, volumes about romantic longings in a prosaic English country house.
Elizabeth is married to Arnold (Pete Ashmore), a stolid MP, and her imagination works overtime as she anticipates their weekend guests. In Arnold’s childhood, his mother, a famed society beauty, scandalously ran off with her lover, yet the ageing renegades disappoint: Jane Asher’s Lady Kitty gaudily decorated in scarlet, all squawk and clatter, bickering with a querulous Nicholas Le Prevost. It wouldn’t be so dismaying if Elizabeth wasn’t herself contemplating doing a romantic runner.
