Family struggles fail to come to the boil

THE HOLLY AND THE IVY, Lowry Quays

WYNYARD Browne’s play, written in 1948 and set a year earlier, has been popular since theatre company Middle Ground revived it a decade ago.

I suggested first time round that its success was probably down to being “in the right hands, with the right approach”, and watching it again, this seems to be the case.

For the current production is far less focused and more unevenly cast than in the carefully-judged original from 1999.

Wynyard Browne wasn’t prolific and this work, about family closeness, religion and secrets, is slightly autobiographical, which is presumably why such scenes are so well written.

Jenny, loving dogsbody to her widowed vicar-father, wants to marry her fiance and go with him to South America, leaving father alone — something love and duty won’t allow her to do.

Today we see the play as a period piece, from a time when men couldn’t do anything domestic and would curl up and die if asked to peel the spuds.

But in among this is a story about a family that keeps secrets from dad because, as a vicar, he wouldn’t understand, or would be upset, or angry. Everyone but dad finds out, as the family gathers on Christmas Eve, that successful second daughter Margaret had an illegitimate baby who died, by a soldier who had died before the child was born — a double tragedy that has driven her to drink and constant sorrow.

Can she come home to take Jenny’s place with such a secret, even if it gives the latter some happiness?

What seems on the surface to be a slightly melodramatic potboiler turns out to be little more than that this time, when before it seemed carefully crafted and beautifully cast.

Here Welshman Philip Madoc sports all manner of nervous and verbal tics — and an Irish accent — as the ultimately kindly vicar, while Zoie Kennedy as Jenny appears to be impersonating a BBC radio announcer for the first act, and only settles down well into the evening.

Best of the current cast is Corinne Wicks as blonde Margaret, though Christine Drummond and Paddy Glynn are fun as a couple of elderly aunts, and Tom Butcher, Nathan Hannan and Alan Leith are sporadically interesting as Jenny’s fiance, brother and Margaret’s godfather respectively.