Neglected talent still burns bright

Charles Spencer reviews So Long Life at the Tobacco Factory, Bristol

FOR years, Peter Nichols has been in danger of becoming the forgotten dramatist of British theatre. While Stoppard, Pinter, Hare, Ayckbourn and Frayn marched confidently on with big hits and public honours, Nichols couldn't even get his work staged.

His last original play in the West End was in the mid-Eighties, and it was only the Donmar Warehouse's revival of his marvellous adultery drama, Passion Play, earlier this year that reminded people of just how good, and how original, Nichols is. The fact that the National Theatre has never staged a prominent revival of one of his plays - A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, for instance - strikes me as scandalous.

One company that has championed Nichols is the admirable Show of Strength, based in a former tobacco factory in the Bristol suburb of Bedminster. A few years ago it staged his hilarious and ingenious comedy Blue Murder, about theatrical censorship in the bad old days of the Lord Chamberlain, and now it is offering the premiere of So Long Life, a typically unsentimental, mordantly funny view of old age. Nichols himself is now in his seventies.

Stephanie Cole stars as the 85-year-old Alice, who is celebrating, if that's the right word, her birthday at the home of her son, Greg, and his second wife, Jill. Also present are Alice's daughter, Wendy, a ghastly "human interest" televison presenter who comes over like a nightmarish cross between Esther Rantzen and Jerry Springer; Wendy's daughter, Imogen, a university lecturer; and Wendy's latest toyboy, a fabulously dim former squaddie with a drugs problem.

With this mixture of characters it is not surprising that the party proves to be far from from plain sailing. Resentments fester, old bitternesses rekindle, and Alice spectacularly proves that being old doesn't necessarily make you nice.

Cole is on wonderfully baleful form as a native Bristolian, pouring scorn on carefully chosen gifts, blurting out indiscretions about her family, and belching furiously after drinking champagne that she describes as sour.

As always, Nichols breaks free of the bonds of realism. There are haunting passages when we eavesdrop on Alice's inner thoughts, in particular her memory of an infidelity with an American soldier during the war. And while Alice nods off, her family discuss putting her into a home, a fate that Alice dreads.

Nichols is the most honest and unsparing of writers. Though you can't help warming to the truculent Alice - there is something particularly endearing about her Bristol trick of adding the letter "L" to words ending in a vowel, so that Australia becomes Australial - Nichols leaves no doubt that she is an emotionally manipulative monster, and that old age brings precious little consolation, still less wisdom.

The play is often funny, and elicits gasps from the audience when an illicit love affair is revealed, but it is also desperately bleak. Almost all the characters are unhappy in their different ways, and death is viewed as a welcome release from the intolerable burden of life.

Jenny Eastop directs with a keen eye for both the work's jokes and its unhappiness. And though Cole dominates the evening, the supporting roles are notably well played, with particularly fine work from Christina Greatrex as the obnoxious but vulnerable telly presenter, Christian Rodska as her weak brother, and Lisa Coleman as the granddaughter, who is the play's only sympathetic character.

Though not quite Nichols at the very top of his form, this is a play that speaks wittily and painfully to its audience about both age and family life. I very much hope it will have a life beyond Nichols's native Bristol.