Dodie Smith started her career as a successful playwright before the second world war. Dear Octopus was first performed in 1938. She wrote the novels for which she is known – The Hundred and One Dalmatians and I Capture the Castle – years later. It’s easy to see why her nuanced play, her sixth, is seldom performed: it is an amusing but almost eventless portrait of a family across three generations, gathered for a golden wedding anniversary. What it needs is a tip-top, fastidious, perfectly pitched production and, with director Emily Burns at the National, this is precisely what it gets.
What unfolds is an extraordinary evening of domestic time travel – a marvel – in which we are taken back to the 30s and into a grand English house outside Birmingham with sage green walls (elegant design by Frankie Bradshaw). The fascination and fun is to see how family life has at once changed and stayed the same. For Smith, family was the octopus from whose tentacles you could never be free.
