Theatrical wizardry

The Late Middle Classes
Donmar, until 17 July

Lilies of the Land
Arts, until 17 July

Plotless plays are usually the work of beginners or nutcases. Very occasionally they’re produced by seasoned theatrical wizards. Simon Gray belongs to the third type. The Late Middle Classes is an absorbing and often hilarious portrait of the buttoned-up English bourgeoisie of the 1950s. Celia and her pathologist husband Charles have pitched up in Hayling Island but they can’t wait to swap its provincial torpor for the glamour of London. Their big move is dependent on their son Holly’s ability to get a full scholarship to a public school. His musical talent is being encouraged by the creepy Mr Brownlow, an Austrian refugee who moonlights as a composer, and whose excitable manner at the piano stool hints at forbidden lusts. Rationing has reduced the family to sub-Soviet levels of penury. Supper consists of powdered egg fried in lard, so poor old Celia has to grovel to the neighbours in the hope of cadging an extra pat of butter.

Very little happens. Holly gets his exam results. Mr Brownlow keeps his trousers on. Mild infidelities are confessed to by the married couple. That’s about it. The play’s interest lies in the subtle and unusual portrait it offers of the upwardly mobile English classes just after the war.

Celia is an impassioned, frustrated, tennis-playing minx who schmoozes her friends over the phone and then tears them to ribbons as soon as the receiver goes down. The gin bottle is never more than six inches from her manicured fingers. Helen McCrory plays the role as if it were a classic of 20th-century theatre, a kind of Judith Bliss without the perfumed smuttiness. Her vitality and thwarted charm are captured quite beautifully. As her husband, Peter Sullivan delivers another of his exquisitely measured and formidably funny essays in understated satire.