William Douglas Home's black comedy asks what is the price of progress: how much do we value our heritage when the Minister of Transport is keen on building new roads through pristine countryside. In his play the eco protesters, rather than New-Age warriors, are the English aristocracy besieged in their drawing room, surrounded by ancestral portraits of Sir Hugh who died at Edgehill.
       Lady Boothroyd has threatened 'to do herself in' when the bulldozers arrive on Monday morning and start work on a bypass in the grounds of Boothroyd Hall. Helen Ryan's brittle and stubborn portrayal of Lady Boothroyd elicits just enough sympathy under her arrogant self-assurance. One has to give her special credit for stepping in so quickly when Claire Bloom cancelled - on the cover of the programme there is an empty space next to Edward Fox where Claire Bloom has been airbrushed out.
       Lady Boothroyd is intent on a rather selfish and pointless suicide, ordering coffin samples and demanding that the butler (who in the war specialized in digging graves and latrines) bury her in the grounds of Boothroyd Hall. However, her pointless gesture rapidly becomes political when her granddaughter's boyfriend, a long-haired journalist played by Dudley Hinton, agrees to photograph her by the graveside and make a splash in all the Sundays. Lady Boothroyd rapidly gets the hang of media manipulation and soon Panorama is ringing up for an interview.
       The undoubted star was Edward Fox's brilliant shuffling portrayal of a very deaf General Sir William Boothroyd who has long given up trying to change his wife's mind. Off the campaign field the General is completely indecisive and incapable of even agreeing to a lunch date. He continually asks his wife throughout the play, nicely undercutting her grand theatrical suicide, what is he to say to Gerald about lunch next week if she does herself in. 'You'll have to make up your own mind,' she tells him. 'I can't,' he replies, 'You've been doing it for the last forty years.'
       Edward Fox's General asserts the banality of the everyday: the fact that so much of life is led on autopilot and even a spouse's imminent suicide cannot shake one free from the drug of habit. Not only undercutting his wife's gesture with repetitive stories of army drunkenness, he also mocks the house's history. Sir Hugh, that brave ancestor who died at Edgehill, was actually thrown from his horse into a duck pond; he sank in his armour like an old tobacco tin going 'glug glug....' Sir William loves imitating and lingering on those final glugs much to his wife's annoyance. What annoys her is that her own grandiose death is a little too similar (in terms of heroic expectations and reality) to that of the drowning soldier and this becomes a poignant symbol for a useless but well-turned out aristocracy sinking into the mud of modernity.
       Andrew Wincott, famous for playing Adam in The Archers, was the caddish only son, who is unwilling to compromise his political position by supporting his mother more forcefully. He glowered convincingly in his jodhpurs in the wonderful faded drawing room with its tapestries and cluttered mantlepiece and soot-blackened fireplace. But at all times the voice of reason and common sense, dotted with surreal and judicious deafness, belonged to Sir William. It's a mark of the play's power that when the bulldozers start work and the butler plays the last post while the family stand facing the sunlit garden, the audience feel a pang for the passing of an eccentric aristocratic genius.
Daniel Jeffreys