The Southbury Child. Bridge Theatre.

The Southbury Child is a sporadically good play even if it feels, rather like the institution it contemplates, a bit anachronistic.

5 July 2022

Consider the central characters in Stephen Beresford’s competent if rather over-plotted new play, The Southbury Child.

The rural Church of England vicar, struggling with a changing world, a drink problem, and a moral choice. The long-suffering frumpy vicar’s wife grappling to forgive her husband’s philandering eye and refusal to compromise. The dowdy daughter, whose lonely singleton life as primary-school teacher is unexpectedly brightened by the arrival of a dazzling new curate. The actress daughter, whose London life of film glamour is not quite what it seems.

If all this sounds like the stuff of a Terence Rattigan play, circa 1950, then you will have an inkling of just how it feels.

Despite a couple of sops to modernity in the form of a gay curate and adopted black daughter, The Southbury Child feels strangely out of its time – almost like a decades-old minor stalwart of the canon, revived for what it might have to say about our times, but not of these times.

That is not to say it is a bad play. In fact, parts of it are quite good. But it certainly is an oddity.

David Highland (a commanding performance by Alex Jennings) is an old-style vicar in the kind of seaside Devon village where, as handsome new curate Craig (Jack Greenlees) tactlessly points out, “people don’t care about what they look like”.

David thinks his flock should get what is best for them rather than what they want. When single, working-class mother Tina (Sarah Twomey) demands balloons and Disney paraphernalia at her young daughter’s funeral, David declines, citing a need to face death firmly in the face rather than hiding it behind frippery.

Cue an almighty ding-dong between an unyielding morally righteous David and the locals, led by devious GPs wife Janet (a fantastic Hermione Gulliford channelling the ghastliest Tory politician imaginable).

Tina’s layabout thug of a brother Lee (Josh Finan) is particularly incensed by the David’s refusal to compromise and has plans of his own to punish the recalcitrant priest.

Set aside for a moment your incredulity at the idea anyone would get quite so het up about a few balloons. At its heart, the townsfolk’s justifiable anger is really about incoming second-home-owners and a lack of local jobs, so the metamorphosis into an anti-vicar crusade is really about the locals drawing a line in the sand – they want things done their way.

This is good set up that leaves a question hanging at the end of the first half – who will give in, David, unsupported by family or the bishop, or the mob?

Unfortunately, the second half meanders off into a series of more or less neatly defined narrative distractions that leave the central conundrum – why David is willing to risk job, home, and marriage over a few globes of latex – unresolved.

The play has something to say about the relevance of the church in a post-Christian, consumer-minded England that expects to get what it wants. It bemoans a world attracted by the simplistic certainties of evangelism, where happiness appears to be a mandated state of life, rather, as one character puts it, “like being hydrated”.

The central message is not reactionary exactly, David is far too wooly-minded a liberal archetype for that, but it is all rather traditionalist, with an occasional undisguised dose of Daily Mail style anti-wokery.

Nicholas Hytner’s fluid direction helps keep the pace moving and there is some engaging gentle Vicar of Dibley style comedy to enjoy. Aside from Alex Jennings, whose remarkably expressive brow-furrowing brings out David’s inner turmoil flawlessly, Jo Herbert’s demoralized wife Mary gets the best lines.

Enjoyable, but Enemy of The People it is not.

Cast

WRITER Stephen Beresford

DIRECTOR Nicholas Hytner

SET DESIGNER Mark Thompson

Holly Atkins JOY SAMPSON

Josh Finan LEE SOUTHBURY

Jack Greenlees CRAIG COLLIER

Hermione Gulliford JANET ORAM

Jo Herbert SUSANNAH HIGHLAND

Alex Jennings DAVID HIGHLAND

Phoebe Nicholls MARY HIGHLAND

Racheal Ofori NAOMI HIGHLAND

Sarah Twomey TINA

Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes. One interval.

Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket.