Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a doorway on one side and a fireplace on the other. These physical boundaries draw the actors towards the middle of the stage with a staircase overhead to complete the frame. Brilliant stuff. Perfectly simple, too.

Any director planning to work at the Lyttelton should see Emily Burns’s fabulous production. So should everyone else. This is a slow-burning family drama that examines the romantic tensions and ancient grudges simmering within an upper-class English clan on the eve of the second world war. It’s not as intense, poetic and wide-ranging as Chekhov but it’s close. Critics who complain about a lack of narrative complexity are overlooking the fact that not every internal conflict translates into action. Sometimes a character endures in silence for decades on end and nothing else happens.

The show stars Lindsay Duncan as Dora, a matriarch in her early seventies, whose beauty requires no external ornament. Her lifelong rival, Belle, also in her seventies, prefers cosmetic intervention and this prompts Dora to remark that Belle’s face is unsafe ‘to be taken out in the rain’. Belle replies by praising Dora’s ‘trust in nature’ which proves that Dora must be ‘genuinely loved’. This subtle catfight continues throughout the play and the malice of the ladies’ backchat is disguised by affection and diplomacy. Every putdown is couched as a compliment, every snarky footnote offered as friendly advice. Mean Girls has nothing on this script by Dodie Smith, whose best-known fictional character, Cruella de Vil, appeared in her 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

QOSHE - Dramatically riveting and visually superb: Dear Octopus, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed - Lloyd Evans
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Dramatically riveting and visually superb: Dear Octopus, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

11 1
22.02.2024

Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a doorway on one side and a fireplace on the other. These physical boundaries draw the actors towards the middle of the stage with a........

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