Dear Octopus – Reviews Round-up

"Lindsay Duncan and co create a living period piece in Dodie Smith’s rarely performed marvel of a family portrait"

"It’s easy to see why her nuanced play, her sixth, is seldom performed: it is an amusing but almost eventless portrait of a family across three generations, gathered for a golden wedding anniversary. What it needs is a tip-top, fastidious, perfectly pitched production and, with director Emily Burns at the National, this is precisely what it gets."

"What unfolds is an extraordinary evening of domestic time travel – a marvel – in which we are taken back to the 30s and into a grand English house outside Birmingham with sage green walls (elegant design by Frankie Bradshaw). The fascination and fun is to see how family life has at once changed and stayed the same. For Smith, family was the octopus from whose tentacles you could never be free."

"The writing is a joy.... The play is a snapshot of prewar contentment, a living period piece, a tonic for our turbulent times."

"Lindsay Duncan leads a warm drama about a bickering family"

"Dodie Smith’s play presents a beautifully drawn, four-generation celebration of a golden wedding anniversary on the eve of the second world war"

"This glorious revival of Dodie Smith’s interwar family drama is a visual and emotional feast. Director Emily Burns breathes rich life into a weekend gathering to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and her husband Charles (Malcolm Sinclair). Duncan is the most graceful of performers. Sharp and soft at once, Dora longs for everyone to spend time together yet is unable to walk into a room without hastily sending everyone out with a job to do. In the rare moments when she pauses for breath, the delight she takes in her family knocks the wind out of you."

"... every missed opportunity and every gesture of kindness is made infinitely more poignant by the fleeting moment they stand in, with one war behind them and the next just ahead."

"Dodie Smith’s slow burning pre-war family saga will suck you in"

"Why is the National Theatre staging this frightfully old fashioned play from the 1930s? A superb performance from Lindsay Duncan and a production tinged with foreboding are reason enough"

"... it takes a long time, but slowly you’re absorbed into the play, osmosed onto the stage, until you’re a part of the Randolph family, too. And when you’ve been pulled close to the fireside and start to love all these characters, Burns reveals even more: that all the gorgeousness of the staging is too gorgeous. A play written in 1938? The happy endings, we now know, couldn’t last – not when Chamberlain’s radio reports sound increasingly pessimistic."

"There’s no great twist or anything. It is what it is: a slightly soppy, unfashionable play whose 90 years are showing. But Burns and the cast honour it, and find truth in it, and eventually it becomes a pretty great pleasure to spend time in the company of this family – and that’s justification enough."

"Particularly poignant revival of Dodie Smith's comedy"

"Timely revival of Dodie Smith’s bittersweet portrait of a family gradually growing older, wiser and more forgiving"

"... playwright Dodie Smith wrote this pensive, melancholy comedy in 1938, against a backdrop of economic recession and escalating conflict in Europe. With our present geopolitical situation increasingly resembling that ominous period, director Emily Burns’ crisp revival feels particularly poignant."

"Smith’s writing is witty, detailed and keenly observed, capturing the fractious family’s dynamics so skillfully that their conversations feel entirely fresh and relatable despite their stiff, overly-mannered mode of speech."

"At the outset, a palpable sense of disappointment hangs heavily over this bustling household. But as the characters methodically talk through their issues, the mood lightens, replaced with hopefulness and warmth. Gradually, the play reveals itself as a touching celebration of enduring love, family and forgiveness."

"Lindsay Duncan is a catty delight in this forgotten West End hit"

"Poignant, exquisitely performed theatre – Dodie Smith’s prophetic play mourns a way of life that is already gone"

"The plotting is also rather soapy, with not one but two long-lost relations returning from abroad for this golden-wedding celebration of Charles and Dora, plus a raft of unrequited passions and much-teased secrets.

"However, Emily Burns’s beautifully sensitive revival makes a persuasive case that Smith’s work has been unfairly neglected, as well as revealing the writer to be queen of the zinger. Imperious matriarch Dora, who is forever finding “little jobs” for everyone, gets the best of these acid putdowns, and the great Lindsay Duncan delivers them with the catty glee of Maggie Smith in her Downton pomp."

"Burns draws out the Chekhovian melancholy beneath the reunion – how it makes this fractious clan wrestle with loss, ageing and a changing world."

"This is poignant, exquisitely performed theatre."

"Lindsay Duncan is a joy in Dear Octopus at the National Theatre"

"Revival of Dodie Smith’s 1938 family drama weaves together warmth, loss and laughter"

"... this rare revival of Dodie Smith’s 1938 play Dear Octopus (at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre), set at a golden wedding anniversary, and led by the superb Lindsay Duncan. And what an unexpected treat it is. In Emily Burns’ beautifully modulated production, it’s like finding a photo album in your grandma’s house and suddenly falling into the past in all its warm, breathing, messy reality."

"At first it all seems irredeemably old-fashioned, ambling along as characters fuss with the fireirons and witter on about muffins and galoshes. But Burns’ delicately acted staging coaxes you to fall for this fretful, funny bunch and gently draws out the melancholy notes beneath the comedy."

"Duncan is a joy in the role, gliding through the action and scattering perfectly timed one-liners in her wake like pins. “You can have your face lifted, but you’ve still got to lift your own legs,” she remarks, as Belle climbs the stairs. She is beautifully matched by Malcolm Sinclair as Charles, a man who has long since opted for a peaceful life."

"Incurably quaint and dated"

"This gently witty revival of Dodie Smith’s play rarely provokes more than a wry smile"

"Those seeking a gently witty, old-fashioned entertainment will be delighted by this stately revival of Dodie Smith’s portrait of a family from 1938. Four generations gather in a gaslit rural home to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of formidable Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and solid, supportive Charles (Malcolm Sinclair) – leisurely, luxurious roles that fit these actors like chamois gloves."

"The tone and pace of the play are monotonous and Smith’s wit is feather-light rather than stiletto-sharp. Though Emily Burns’s production is impeccably cast and handsomely mounted it rarely provokes more than a a wry smile."

"There is a reason, though, that Dodie Smith is chiefly remembered for her novel I Capture the Castle and a certain story about a lot of Dalmatians, rather than for her eight interwar stage comedies. Dear Octopus was the most successful of these but despite the merits of Burn’s revival, it feels incurably quaint and dated now."

"101 complications in a crowded household"

"Beneath the oh so genteel patina of middle-class manners, there’s an occasional glint of steel in this revival of a gently meandering family drama by Dodie Smith that was first seen in the West End in 1938. Some of the dialogue is showing its age but Emily Burns’s direction supplies the Chekhovian polish that’s become almost part of the house style at the National. Sometimes you long for a little more pace and levity. But for all its occasional longueurs, the evening is lifted by an imperious performance by Lindsay Duncan as a grandmother presiding over golden anniversary celebrations that come close to being thrown off course by domestic tensions and romantic intrigues."

"Death and the passing of time form constant motifs but Smith’s gift for comedy keeps us from the abyss."