J B Priestley’s play had its premiere in Liverpool 1932 and there was a production by Cambridge undergraduates in 1935; and that was it, until Hugh Ross’s present enjoyable revival. The comedy, very light and typical of its era, is given a quasi-intellectual edge with its facile satire at the expense of the bourgeoisie and the communists who are in a state of economic and social confusion.
A bankrupt aristocrat is confronted by his estranged daughter (Bessie Carter) who returns from Russia as a keen communist with a male comrade (Steven Blakeley) in tow. She makes her entrance in shorts, dirty sweater and a large black beret, looking like a male mechanic in a third-rate garage; and very off-putting she is, too. Her dingy, sullen, scruffy, ugly commie boyfriend is even more off-putting.
The politically-minded daughter was written for Peggy Ashcroft, with whom Priestley was having an affair, and the role could be read as a gentle joke at her political expense. Ashcroft never played her. Bessie Carter (the daughter of Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter) has just graduated from drama school and is making her stage debut. Her second act entrance is a wonderful transformation: she is irresistibly feminine. Meanwhile, Hugh Sachs, as the aristocrat’s best friend, an Edwardian parasite and idler (his own words), has all the witty Wildean lines.