Thoughtful portrayal of isolation

The Old Country - Gulbenkian Theatre For their 162nd season in Canterbury, the Old Stagers performed Alan Bennett’s 1977 play.

Dealing with familiar Bennett themes of betrayal and isolation, the play is set in the home of Hilary, a British defector and former spy for the Soviet Union, in the country outside Moscow.

The Old Stagers make a difficult play highly watchable. What could have been an evening of talking heads was developed by the cast and the director Shana Fleming to bring out the flawed personalities of the characters and the shifting and difficult relationships between them.

Richard Ritchie, as Hilary, played a man mainly talking to himself and living inside his own head. His apology for the many deaths he has caused is merely polite; to him, they happened on the other side of the mirror. It was a remarkable performance in a demanding, complex part.

Gabrielle Wales, very skillfully and expertly showed us the exhaustion and enervation that had overwhelmed Bron from supporting a husband whom she loves but can no longer respect and whose treachery she cannot condone, in a situation as bleak as it is incongruous.

Oscar Ratcliffe caught our sympathy for Eric, who is not important enough for anyone (including his wife) to worry about much, and is found unsuitable (for reasons of both intellect and class) as a companion by Hilary.

Grace Cartwright’s Olga was convincing as a humourless apparatchik, whose ankle-socks were indeed (as Hilary remarks) distinctly sinister.

Kate Robertson showed us Veronica as a sort of middle-aged It Girl, with a fathomless triviality of mind, happy to live with whatever problems Duff produced for her provided the shopping and social life are sufficiently fun and expensive.

Crispian Cartwright in a magisterial performance gave Duff the gravitas and well-polished Establishment smoothness that makes such people so effective as well as so utterly annoying. One could guess that the people he was dealing with on the Soviet side were just like himself.

We know that the fate that awaits Hilary in the Old Country will be – in essence – no different from his life at present. Jack Wales