ajhlovestheatre

THE GATHERED LEAVES

by Andrew Keatley

directed by Adrian Noble

Park Theatre, London – until 20 September 2025

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval 

https://parktheatre.co.uk/events/the-gathered-leaves/

Fractured families have long been a staple of stage drama. Andrew Keatley’s saga of an upper middle class English clan congregating for a tempestuous birthday weekend at their country pile, is reminiscent of the kind of thing seen on Shaftesbury Avenue three or four decades ago, especially as staged by former RSC artistic director Adrian Noble. The Gathered Leaves probably seemed dated when it premiered here at the Park back in 2015, and it feels positively antediluvian now. 

That original production had the benefit, for a family drama, of fielding two sets of actual family members (Jane Asher and daughter Katie Scarfe, and father and son Alexander and Tom Hanson) playing various members of the embattled Pennington tribe, which may have lent a certain frisson. This revival doesn’t have that but boasts some serious luxury casting (Jonathan Hyde, Joanne Pearce, Olivia Vinall, Chris Larkin, Zoë Waites) with collective credits that read like a who’s who of high quality legit British theatre. 

Initially, from director to cast list to Dick Bird’s opulently muted drawing room set with its creamy upholstery, antique furniture and chandelier, this has all the trappings of the classic ‘well made play’…but then, unfortunately, we get into the script which has aged like milk. In the present climate it’s a pretty big ask for an audience to invest in a bunch of self-involved, privileged monsters with reactionary views on race (the youngest daughter had a child out of wedlock with a Black man – shock horror!) and mental health (the eldest son is autistic). Keatley has the younger and/or more enlightened characters attempt to correct the blinkered opinions of their elders/less advanced thinkers but those moments come across like a sort of rudimentary beginners guide to social progress.

It doesn’t help that the younger family members  look and sound like a middle aged person’s bland idea of what a teenager or young adult was like in the 1990s (the play is set just as New Labour was coming in). They just don’t ring true. Keatley explores the idea of the ‘old guard’ moving aside in a scene where ageing lawyer William Pennington (Hyde), now in the early stages of dementia, lectures his 22 year old grandson Simon (George Lorimer, in a creditable stage debut) on the importance of carrying on the family line. Simon is suitably appalled but the writing is so flavourless that it’s hard to know who we’re supposed to root for.

It’s all too asinine to be really offensive, but it’s a mystery why anybody thought this was worth reviving. The tricky dynamics of familial relationships are laid out with all the sophistication and originality of a particularly uninspired episode of Crossroads. Keatley certainly nails the tedium of family gatherings: we get to watch the Penningtons play board games, discuss what they’re going to have for dinner, where they bought a particularly nice sort of gift wrap….if you find this sort of thing riveting in the theatre, then the best of British to you, but I thought my brain was going to melt. 

An affair is revealed while mopping up spilt tea, one of the brothers hits the bottle (can’t say I blame him), the teenage girls illicitly down huge quantities of white sambuca in the middle of the night with no apparent effect, William ups the ante by periodically becoming irrationally enraged….and it all plods on for the best part of three hours. In one particularly excruciating sequence, estranged daughter Alice (Olivia Vinall, very likeable, to be fair) discovers the piano she hasn’t played in years and has a little tinkle…cue the entire family drifting on from different directions and sitting around in spotlights with beatific looks on their smug faces. Ah, the power of music….then everybody goes back to talking As Though They Are In A Play.

Lots of speeches are clumsily inserted purely for exposition, so that the audience is clued up on the back stories of this dull lot, but the characterisations are pretty muddy and one-note despite the efforts of a game cast. Richard Stirling delivers sensitive, committed work as the autistic older brother and Chris Larkin finds real warmth and layers in the middle sibling whose professional success as a doctor is in stark contrast to his fractured personal relationships. Joe Burrell and Ellis Elijah are excellent as the younger versions of the brothers in the extended flashback sequences. It’s lovely to see Hyde and Pearce back on stage but one can’t help but wish it was in a stronger vehicle. 

Maybe this is intended to be the theatrical equivalent of comfort food and will perhaps satisfy people of a certain age who yearn for the dramas of times past when issues were thrashed out by characters sitting around on comfy armchairs and chaises longues, untroubled by the greater world at large. It absolutely wasn’t for me.