The Gathered Leaves at the Park Theatre review: a slowly beguiling, elegant revival

Autism, racism, domestic bust-ups and generational rifts. Andrew Keatley’s slowly beguiling, 1997-set country house drama covers a lot of ground. It’s an old-fashioned and at times schematic family saga that nonetheless treats its multiple themes with seriousness and care and eventually exerts a cumulative power. Like the original production at the Park ten years ago, Adrian Noble’s elegant revival is peopled with thoroughbred stage actors, who plough determinedly through the boggier bits of dialogue and exposition.

Britain is on the verge of a New Labour landslide, and in the handsome ancestral home of the Pennington clan change is also afoot. Beakish paterfamilias William (Jonathan Hyde) is a senior lawyer and an autocratic stickler for tradition, forced to unbend a little in the face of his 75th birthday and a diagnosis of vascular dementia. His wife Olivia (Joanne Pearce) is pretty much the textbook expression of “long-suffering”.