Epitaph for George Dillon begins and ends with a cuddle. In a 1950s living room cluttered with china and chintz, teenager Josie wraps her arms around an imagined lover, lies back on the couch, and wonders aloud what 'it' would be like. And at the play's close, 'Come on, Mum, let's dance!', George's final line and perhaps only kind gesture, to Anne Reid's Mrs. Elliot.
     Written just before Look Back in Anger made John Osborne famous, Epigraph for George Dillon is coruscating about actor-writer George's inclination to be a useless bore, 'that ridiculous being called an artist'. A collaboration with Anthony Creighton, this earlier play is in many ways warmer - its hopeless would-be hero more angsty than angry. As played by Joseph Fiennes, George emerges as a more forgiving and forgivable character than expected.
In Peter Gill's hands the play's potentially odd texture coheres into a convincing tragi-comedy: fantastically funny, bleak and deeply affecting. A cruel moment of queasy comedy at the end of Act 1 sets the tone. The joke, delivered with goading panache by Fiennes, invites us - and it seems himself - to accept, that yes, he really is as awful as we suspect.
     Too big for his Osborne-style duffel coat, from the moment he walks through the small suburban front door - all pretended public school pontificating and hollow gratitude - the 'lovely young man' George Dillon is evidently anything but a grateful pup down on his luck. Anne Reid as Mrs. Elliot, Dorothy Atkinson as spinster in waiting Norah, Zoe Tapper as Josie and Geoffrey Hutchings's Mr. Elliot are all in a way his victims and they give performances that rest carefully on the brink of parody.
      Technically an out of work actor, with a mixture of vile verve and clownish hunger for affection, Fiennes's George in fact rarely stops performing. The scenes with Francesca Annis's hardened, once romantic Ruth are the only ones in which we are allowed to see the rather unspectacular young man behind the bravado. Ruth, her vowels as flattened as her spirit, is as trapped as her young niece Josie. She's a potentially dour character whom Annis instead imbues with allure and a powerfully pervasive sadness; how 'young' you look 'sometimes' is George's foot-in-it attempt at flattery, barely registering how powerfully he is drawn.
The final embrace, when it comes, between indulgent mother, Mrs. Elliot, and the freeloading, lazily seductive surrogate son who has taken advantage in every possible way, is pathetic in every sense of the word.
     The Elliots are nothing special. From Ruth, for whom it is far too late to take chances on starving artist lovers, comes the constant melancholic reminder that even if they are better educated and cleverer than the rest of the household, neither she nor George are special either. The great emotional snag of this otherwise extraordinary production is that it leaves us wishing she were wrong.
Olivia Cole