The pandemic has brought out the budding playwright in Richard Eyre, former artistic director of the National Theatre. He conceived The Snail House during lockdown and it becomes, courageously, his first original play in a vast, rich oeuvre of directed and adapted works for stage and screen.
This debut, which he also directs, is a family drama cum state-of-the-nation play cum tale of medical misdiagnosis. As interesting as these parts are, they do not make a unified whole.
It opens in an oak-panelled hall where a birthday dinner is being laid for Neil Marriot (Vincent Franklin), an eminent paediatrician, recently knighted. Silver-service staff line up the cutlery; Neil’s wife, Val (Eva Pope), arranges the flowers; his children, Hugo (Patrick Walshe McBride) and Sarah (Grace Hogg-Robinson), bicker and bitch.
Eyre steers clear of the cliched onstage dinner party by casting the action in the “other” room, an adjunct to where the guests are gathered, rather like Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party in its dramatic positioning. But unlike that classic, the clashes do not feel charged and the punches do not land. Sarah, a teen activist, speaks too tinnily about climate emergency while Hugo, a cartoonishly drawn political adviser, wafts around delivering airy put-downs.
It is only at the end of the first half that some jeopardy gathers after catering manager Florence (Amanda Bright) reveals a backstory involving a wrong diagnosis in a child abuse case which landed her in prison, and impugns Neil’s professional judgment. But this strand disappears until the latter half of the second act when it is too quickly and tamely resolved.
There are also father and daughter face-offs which sound real but are circular and repetitious. Sarah is too shrill but even then our sympathies stop short of siding with Neil when he condemns her entire generation as one that does nothing but go on marches and wear rainbow ribbons. We get glimpses into the lives of the catering staff who occasionally interact with the family, not always convincingly, but these are not penetrating.
There are some good moments nonetheless: Hugo labelling the monarchy as “the chinless Kardashians”, Neil’s powerful description of an orphanage in Ceaușescu’s Romania and the singing voice of upstart waitress Wynona (Megan McDonnell). But ultimately the script takes on too much without giving us enough, leaving this feeling like a play uncertain of its focus.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 15 October
