I want to say, as a qualification to the rest of this review, that this was a good production, which I enjoyed watching. The fairly simple comfortable living room set worked well, especially in the intimate Peterhouse Theatre, a lovely little theatre which I get the impression too few people are aware of at all. Everything looked well, sounded well, and – aside from a few too many blackouts, at one point misleading the audience into clapping an ending which wasn’t yet reached – the technical aspects of the production were subtle and unobtrusive to the characters losing, finding and exposing their minds to us on stage. And the acting was, on the whole, good.

But it wasn’t quite good enough. Eliot’s script, excepting the very strange, much less successful religious turn it takes towards the end, is interesting and insightful. In a stylised and unfortunately slightly dated manner, with lots scenes consisting of two or three characters pouring out their thoughts and anxieties in long speeches at cross purposes with one another, the script displays considerable understanding of the ways people might feel and act in a stagnating relationship, or the pains of having to completely reassess someone you thought you had shared something meaningful with. Characters would often spin off mid-discussion in incomprehensible directions, or resort to weird metaphors to explain how they felt. All this is very difficult to get precisely right.

Though by no means notably bad, the actors didn’t seem invested enough in their characters for much of what could have been brilliant about the play to be fully realised, though many times it came close. Most of the time there was a kind of flatness which didn’t quite let the characters appear as real people, and this meant that I couldn’t invest in their emotions as I would have liked. For instance, Hellie Canney’s Celia really should have given us tears, or at least tried to, and instead we got slightly distant distress. The more difficult moments in the script should have justified themselves as the strange products of an extremity of emotion, but the actors hadn’t quite committed enough for them to cohere.

The exception to this was Kesia Guillery as Lavinia Chamberlayne, who was always the most captivating character on stage. It felt like she had put significantly more thought into how her character’s thoughts and feelings would manifest themselves in the subtleties of tone and movement, and I was more emotionally involved in her scenes than in many of the others. Joey Akubeze as Edward Chamberlayne also won me over by the end of the play. I initially felt that his confused, hapless victim of his own ineptitude act was a little bit too unchanging, but as the play went on and his character developed I felt that he managed to justify the slightly jarring way he’d chosen to play Edward earlier on.

This play was an obviously challenging task to have taken on, and I felt that despite some good performances, it was a challenge which the cast couldn’t quite rise to. There were many moments of potential brilliance which bubbled up but never quite reached out to the audience as they could have done. It was good, but not quite as good as it deserved to be.