Merton Hodge’s whimsical play became an international hit on its 1933 premiere and was performed over a thousand times and translated into numerous languages. This staging, which marks the first professional London production for more than 80 years, shows how a zeitgeisty drama can date. In this quiet comedy following three medical students in an Edinburgh boarding house, we only ever see them gathered in its front room to eat, study, drink and quip.
It is a meticulously revived period piece, designed with detail by Carla Evans and its 1930s language fully intact – there are ample “old boys” and “cheer-os”. The play captures the hopes and fears of student life for a certain class of men, too, and it could be seen as a Men Behaving Badly type drama of its day: rakish Gilbert (Mark Lawrence) boasts of his sexual exploits, John (Harvey Cole) is a sports bore and Charles (Joe Pitts) the new arrival and swot. The house’s refined Frenchman, Dr Paul Duhamel (David Furlong), occasionally pops up and the Scottish housekeeper Mrs McFie (Jenny Lee), brings gentle humour.
In a production directed by Geoffrey Beevers, characters waft in and out, having meandering conversations about their impending night out, the rain outside, their love interests. The pace is glacial and it is hard to know where the story is going but it eventually finds a direction in Charles. Through him, it shows a tug between family duty versus love and sexual freedom after he falls for sculptor Anne (Naomi Preston-Low) but is already attached to Jill (Helen Reuben), who his family are keen for him to marry.
The storyline gathers momentum towards the end but takes too long to get there with not enough emotional payoff. It is a shame because the cast is excellent, from Reuben’s brittle gaiety as Jill to Preston-Low’s contained anguish as Anne when she finds herself caught in a love triangle. There is an amusing turn by Lynton Appleton as Jill’s cocktail-making squeeze Roger, and Pitts gives a strong central performance.
Every character but Charles is paper thin and his dilemma, of whether to please his family or himself, seems too anaemic now. Apparently inspired by Hodge’s experience of training as a doctor and also, arguably, of his bisexuality, it might have held a coded double-meaning in 1933, but here we see Charles merely stuck between marrying one middle-class woman or another.
Like the Shakespearean reference of the title, this is a play of windy drifting.
At Finborough theatre, London, until 5 August
