REVIEW: TO SEE OURSELVES by EM Delafield at White Bear Theatre, Kennington 1 to 12 July 2025
‘thoroughly charming if not quite Noel Coward ’★★★
The thing about hugely popular authors is you never quite know who’s going to make it beyond their own time and into posterity. After all, in their time Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli sometimes sold quite as many books as Charles Dickens did, but he still fills long slabs of bookshelves, while one of them’s remembered as an unusual Prime Minister and the other, if at all, largely for giving Charlie Brown’s beagle Snoopy the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night”.
And so to E.M. Delafield, author of numerous books and plays including the charming and lastingly famous (and still in print) Diary of a Provincial Lady, whose 1930s play earns a welcome revival at the White Bear, its first in London since the 1940s.
We’re in the country home of paper mill owner Freddie (Jonathan Henwood) and his very bored wife Caroline (Becky Lumb) for a three-day stay by her sister and the man she may or may not be about to be engaged to. Life is hum and life is drum as Freddie reads his paper and smokes his pipe while Caroline dreams of romance and nights at Alhambra. Until the disruptive machinations of Jill (Rebecca Pickering) bring Owen (Jonathan Davenport) a little closer to Caroline than might be entirely seemly, causing chaos in the home until order is restored as Freddie’s unseeing eyes begin to widen.
This is light comedy of the charmingly frivolous kind with a stronger psychological undertow than that sometimes suggests. It’s nicely staged, lit and sound-effected on a simple set with well-designed period costumes and touches including newspaper, pipe and telephone. And it’s funny and touching, exploring the tiresome absence of choices that faced women in the inter-war years, an age when marriage and children was pretty much the defining life choice.
Becky Lumb in the lead is the heart and soul of the production, capturing both the boredom of her stultifying life in the country and the hope of her dreams of something better. Her performance swoops and rises with her emotions and she manages even to suggest a lingering love for a stolidly unimaginative husband who really does try her sorely without ever being anything other than faithfully tedious.
There’s strong support from Pickering as her sister, though some unevenness in the variety of acting styles is on show, and perhaps a mild absence of pace in picking up cues for lines that deserve more laughs than they sometimes get.
What the play isn’t is what the programme optimistically hopes – proof that Delafield didn’t deserve to be overwhelmed by her contemporary Noel Coward in the long-lasting fame and production stakes. But it’s witty and straightforward story-telling, psychologically sharp without being surprising or biting in the way that the best of Coward is. And while some individual lines are in the Coward class, the mechanics of the plot (slightly obvious contrivances to get people on and off the stage when they need or don’t need to hear things – a whisky to fetch here, a visitor book to search for there) sometimes show a little too clearly.
And so, it’s a thoroughly charming show even if not quite Noel Coward, but given that very few things are Noel Coward, a very warm and pleasant way to pass an evening.
TO SEE OURSELVES by EM Delafield
Directed by Luke Dixon
White Bear, Kennington 1 to 12 July 2025
Box Office: https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/to-see-ourselves
Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.
