Farewell to the Theatre – review

2 / 5 stars
Rose, Kingston

Without the actor, director and playwright Harley Granville-Barker we would not have today's theatre. He was a natural revolutionary who ran against the prevailing theatrical tide and inspired the model for both the Royal Court and the regional repertory system. It was his enthusiasm that sparked the movement towards a National Theatre. He also wrote some fine plays including The Voysey Inheritance and Waste, mordantly funny, steely dramas that still have the power to make an audience sit up and gasp.

But later in his career he lost his sparkle. Next year Hampstead theatre is premiering Farewell to Theatre, a new play by Richard Nelson, directed by Roger Michell, that speculates about Granville-Barker's wilderness years in the US during the first world war, when he had become estranged from the theatre. But in the meantime, the Rose offers the British premiere of Granville Barker's 1916 play of almost the same name, a wistful nugget about a successful grande dame, Dorothy (Jane Asher) making a last visit to her lawyer, Edward (Richard Cordery) a man who has loved her through all the years that he was married to another and she was married to theatre.

But it is the end of an era. His wife is dead and the theatre she runs is facing bankruptcy. "The dear public", as Dorothy acidly calls them, only want her to do more of what she had done before and she knows that it's time to make her final exit. Asher, looking every inch the flame-haired iconoclast, and the incomparable Cordery are both excellent, but the drama remains earthbound and elusive, as if Granville Barker couldn't bear to fully articulate his falling out of love with the art-form he did so much to shape.