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Albion theatre review: Shot through with shrewdly observed humour

Magnetic: Victoria Hamilton as Audrey (right): Marc Brenner
Magnetic: Victoria Hamilton as Audrey (right): Marc Brenner

In Mike Bartlett’s new state-of-the-nation play, the destiny of a garden in rural Oxfordshire prompts reflections on identity, social class and the dangers of nostalgia.

Once cultivated by a visionary, this sacred garden's carefully themed zones have been allowed to decay. The advent of new owner Audrey, a business leader whose soldier son has been killed by a roadside bomb while serving abroad, brings the promise of restoration, but her colossal ambition is incompatible with the needs of the rest of the community.

Audrey’s grandiose ideas and brisk manner jar against the values of all around her — daughter Zara, who’s an aspiring writer, and old friend Katherine, a bohemian author of bestsellers, as well as earnest neighbour Gabriel, the locals who clean the house and tend the plants, and her dead son’s anxious, passionate ex, Anna.

As he probes the intricacies of family life, Bartlett pays obvious homage to Chekhov, matching his sense of domesticity's mixture of stultifying banality and desperate strangeness — while also calling to mind the wistful cleverness of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

Director Rupert Goold boldly reconfigures this elegant space — dominated in Miriam Buether’s design by a venerable tree and beds of plants that are at least intermittently lush. The long first half is more assured than the second, and a couple of scenes are baggy (even if remediably so). Some of the allusions to the turbulent process of Brexit feel effortful, and several characters’ actions strain credibility.

But the play is shot through with shrewdly observed humour, and there are moments of vivid poignancy. Among an array of fine performances, Helen Schlesinger’s sparky Katherine stands out, along with Charlotte Hope as elusive, callow Zara.

Newcomer Luke Thallon impresses as Gabriel, whose chirpiness always seems tinged with mournfulness. At one point he delivers a devastating vision of his future — ‘I’ll make coffee. Then I’ll manage people making coffee. That’s probably it.’

However, no line lands more satisfyingly than when Margot Leicester as slow-moving cleaner Cheryl turns the single word ‘Hello’, addressed to Katherine, into a whole stanza of carefully moderated contempt. It's as though generations of resentment are peeping round the edges of politeness's precarious facade.

At the heart of the production is Victoria Hamilton, magnetic as Audrey. Making a welcome return to the London stage, the star of Doctor Foster and Netflix series The Crown captures with piercing precision the contradictions of a figure whose obsessiveness and air of entitlement don’t stop her plumbing the depths of bewilderment and grief.

Until Nov 24 (020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk)