Theatre review: Travels With My Aunt

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Travels With My Aunt invites the critics in on Wednesday.

It may continue to be a hit factory, but sometimes the Menier Chocolate Factory makes some very odd programming choices. After last year's aunt-related nostalgia trip we now get another in Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt, in Giles Havergal's 1989 adaptation, revived here by Christopher Luscombe. Henry Pulling is a retired bank manager who's played things safe all his life. At his mother's funeral he meets her estranged sister, his Aunt Augusta, for the first time, and is sucked into a more bohemian world: Augusta's life has been one of torrid affairs (with an unfortunate preference for war criminals,) smuggling and the worldwide travel that comes with it. In an attempt to finally connect with her nephew, Augusta brings Henry along on her latest series of adventures across Europe, and eventually across the Atlantic to end up in Paraguay - but not before she reveals a few shocking truths about his family history.

Theatre review: The Living Room

A rather different meditation on religion tonight than the one I watched last night. Tom Littler revives Graham Greene's first play at Jermyn Street, and like some of Greene's novels it wrestles with the Catholicism he converted to. In The Living Room 20-year-old Rose (Tuppence Middleton,) whose father died when she was a baby, has just lost her mother as well. She is to be placed in the care of her great uncle and two great aunts, in a large London house that appears to have been badly affected during the Blitz. Her uncle James (Christopher Timothy) is a Catholic priest, confined to a wheelchair 20 years previously, so the secret Rose is barely able to keep will be a problem in this household: She's recently started having an affair with Michael (Christopher Villiers,) the much older, married executor of her mother's will.