Passion Play; The Match Box

How fashions change. Peter Nichols’s adultery drama, Passion Play, will seem tame and rather conventional to modern audiences. It was written in 1981 at a time when the rites and idioms of therapy hadn’t penetrated every level of our culture. Back then the candid scrutiny of one’s emotions, supervised by a ruminating analyst, was a thrilling and sophisticated novelty available only to high-earning fashion junkies. Today’s self-elevators choose different proofs of social altitude. They drink Bhutanese champagne, they purchase dachas in Moldova, or they holiday on the Great Barrier Reef in the family bathyscaphe.

Nichols sets his drama in a swish London suburb where James, an ageing art dealer, is seduced by Kate, a killer bimbo with a penchant for lovable old daddy-bears. David Leveaux’s production is stylish, snappy and great to look at. Owen Teale is pleasingly daft and vulnerable as the tousled rogue James. And Annabel Scholey is heart-thumpingly sexy as the granddad-grabber in a black suspender-belt. Oliver Cotton, who plays James’s inner voice, has such an extraordinary visual presence that he threatens to knock the play off course each time he bursts on stage. With his great black panda-eyes, and his surging mane of snowy white hair, he looks like a heroin-addicted Old Father Saturn standing in a wind tunnel.

Some of Nichols’s plotting is a little hard to swallow. In Act II he asks us to believe that Eleanor, having learnt of James’s adultery, would take Kate out on a shopping spree. No chance. Nichols also plays with the form and supplies James and Eleanor with an alter ego who articulates their private thoughts. The result is complicated, technically brilliant and dramatically rather distancing. What thrills us here is the playwright’s performance rather than the agonies and ecstasies of his characters.