Lindsay Duncan is a joy in Dear Octopus at the National Theatre, London — review

The family drama is back, and how. The past fortnight has seen Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California and Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down open on the London stage. They’re now joined by this rare revival of Dodie Smith’s 1938 play Dear Octopus (at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre), set at a golden wedding anniversary, and led by the superb Lindsay Duncan.

And what an unexpected treat it is. In Emily Burns’ beautifully modulated production, it’s like finding a photo album in your grandma’s house and suddenly falling into the past in all its warm, breathing, messy reality. We’re in a draughty old pile in the country (peeling slightly in Frankie Bradshaw’s evocative design), where sundry adult siblings gather to celebrate the remarkably long marriage of their parents Dora and Charles and rummage around in memories and grievances.

At first it all seems irredeemably old-fashioned, ambling along as characters fuss with the fireirons and witter on about muffins and galoshes. But Burns’ delicately acted staging coaxes you to fall for this fretful, funny bunch and gently draws out the melancholy notes beneath the comedy.

There’s plenty of pain here: an estranged daughter, Cynthia (Bethan Cullinane), hovers nervously on the edges; an unrequited love simmers behind the well-preserved facade of Belle (Kate Fahy), Dora’s long absent sister-in-law; two siblings have died — “Scrap”, one of the little children who scamper through the drama, is an orphan.

And there’s greater loss still in the air. The scars of the 1914-18 war still linger and news briefings on the radio about gas masks and air raids send a ripple of foreboding around the stage. For today’s audience, cognisant of what’s to come, it lends an added poignancy to the drama and makes its concerns with ageing, mortality and reconciliation all the more touching.

But the tone, for the most part, is comic. Smith (best known for her children’s novel The Hundred and One Dalmations) had a waspish sense of humour and equips her characters with some mic-drop lines. Chief culprit is Dora: a dramatic creation to challenge Coward and Wilde’s sharp-tongued matrons, she sends anyone who has the temerity to rest their backside on a chair scurrying off on a little domestic chore, then grumbles at their absence.

Duncan is a joy in the role, gliding through the action and scattering perfectly timed one-liners in her wake like pins. “You can have your face lifted, but you’ve still got to lift your own legs,” she remarks, as Belle climbs the stairs. She is beautifully matched by Malcolm Sinclair as Charles, a man who has long since opted for a peaceful life.

Behind all the quips about ageing, however, lies something more solemn: a keen sense of time passing and the need to seize the day. It’s there in the slow-burning plots: will Nicholas (Billy Howle) realise that he’s in love with Fenny (Bessie Carter)? Will Dora and Cynthia be reconciled? What will become of the next generation? A better, tougher playwright might have resisted a happy ending (see Chekhov’s Lopakhin and Varya in The Cherry Orchard). But this drama, like late Shakespeare, is interested in grasping happiness where you may. As Dora says, in the play’s climactic scene, “better to lose a principle than a daughter.”

★★★★☆

To March 27, nationaltheatre.org.uk