Brideshead revisited

Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a famous scribbler who never gives interviews. This slow-moving tale is intercut with scenes from Frances’s day job at a failing newspaper where the staff keep getting the boot.

But Frances, mystifyingly, retains her post. How come? Floppiness is her most conspicuous quality. She’s a watchful sponge with no wit, charm or intellect, and for most of the action she lacks any real purpose other than to hang around the place, chatting. She has many secondary characteristics, far more than is usual for a dramatic figure, and all of them are feebly delineated. She’s a liar but her fibs are negligible. She’s a social climber who ascends barely half a rung above the class from which she began. She’s an occasional thief who targets minor items not valued by their owners. She’s ambitious at work but she succeeds through luck rather than talent or guile. Sexually she’s inert but for the effortless seduction of a fat bald old git (the scribbler), and their romance vaporises like a gnat’s burp as they swap physical passion for domestic torpor. Socially she’s a clingy nuisance and yet her clinginess is at about Post-It note level. And her obsession with the Kytes, on which the entire play turns, is a hobby rather than a mental disorder.

The supplementary characters are more engaging. Simon Manyonda plays Frances’s enjoyably fruity colleague, Oliver, and Leah Gayer has fun as Polly, a posh thicko from drama school who wants to do Shakespeare in scout huts and then decides she can’t be bothered.