1919: almost unscathed from his time in the trenches, Frank Gibbons returns to civilian life, starts a new job in a travel agency and moves his wife, Ethel, their three children, Reg, Vi and Queenie, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Flint, into a new home near Clapham Common. Read more …
On the day of the move to Number 17 Sycamore Road, Frank is delighted to discover that their nearest neighbour is Bob Mitchell, an old comrade-in-arms whom he had given up for dead in 1915. With the Mitchells – Bob, his wife Nora, and son Billy - living cheek by jowl with the Gibbonses, the two families adapt to life in suburbia - and to peacetime.
Over the next 20 years, as their parents slip into middle-age, the children grow up and become the next generation, subject to all the usual trials and tribulations: political awakenings, doomed romances, tragic accidents, unexpected weddings, and shameful elopements, the human face of the two momentous decades between the wars stretching from the coming of the Jazz Age, the General Strike and the depression, to the rise of fascism, appeasement and Munich.
Written in the spring of 1939, but rarely seen on the stage after David Lean’s magnificent film version was released in 1944, Coward’s saga of the lives and loves of one lower-middle-class family and their friends during a turbulent period of history is warm-hearted, funny, deeply moving and infused with a love of Britain and its people.
While John Durnin's production is at times a tad wobbly and overplayed, a tenderness runs throughout.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry from Thursday July 28, 2016, until Saturday October 15, 2016. In repertory. Check website for specific dates and times.. More info: www.pitlochry.org.uk
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