Review: WHEN WE ARE MARRIED, Donmar Warehouse

Okay, so climate change is having its say about this, but colossal energy bills are making some buildings colder inside than out, so it still holds…

“In the bleak midwinter / frosty wind made moan, / earth stood hard as iron, / water like a stone.”

'Tis the season to be chilly, the days when to be merry is a glorious sunny release. There can be few merrier shows in town this bleak midwinter than The Donmar Warehouse’s super-slick, laugh-a-minute, new production of When We Are Married.

I had never seen a JB Priestley play before. I’d never done him at school and I’m just a bit too young to recall his turns on 60s and 70s TV chat shows. I knew him to be ‘one of ours’ of course - northern, leftish, upset the right people, turned down gongs, followed his own star - but was he any good? Worse (and this is always a danger with the big beasts of 20th century comedy) would The Cringe drown out The Humour?

From the moment Janice Connolly walks out as the obstreperous housekeeper, Mrs Northrop, and demolishes the fourth wall with a music hall number dripping with the joys of working class transgression and smart innuendo, I knew I was in safe hands. The laughs started then and they didn’t stop for two hours.

The premise is straightforward if unlikely. In a small town in Yorkshire, three couples meet to celebrate the silver anniversary of their joint weddings. But they learn that their parson was still in training, unlicensed and, hence, they are not married at all! Grown fat on new Edwardian money and social climbing, the threat to their entitled status is almost too much to bear. Worse, shorn of legal and moral ties, the worms can turn and bite their bullying, philandering, selfish spouses on the backside. Cue middle class mayhem!

There are few real zingers in Priestley’s script (though easily more than in many 21st century comedies) because it’s not a wisecracking show - it’s very English, leaning towards French rather than American, in its sense of humour. The laughs come from character and performance, the grotesque menagerie of men and women only tethered to earth by the ineluctable fact that we all know people like that. Whisper it, but we may even be just a bit like that ourselves! There’s no real cruelty in the satire, the barbs directed more at the ideas than at the individuals who spout them, a kind of glow always present to dispel the darkness that might fill these souls off stage.

The other source of humour is in the structure of the script and, to be fair, in Tim Sheader’s ultra-tight direction. No word is misplaced, no gesture unnecessary, no plot point a stretch. If constructing comedy is a brutal exercise in editing, excising all extraneous material to leave behind the funny with the minimum of scaffolding to support it, well here is a perfect example.

None of it works without an ensemble who understand the great theatrical discipline farce demands and the strange alchemy of comedy’s secret ingredient - timing. 

The three couples are beautifully cast. John Hodgkinson delights as the Alderman who enjoys blokeish holidays in Blackpool and living off the hard graft of his wife, Maria (a poignant Siobhan Finneran). Sophie Thompson effects the greatest transformation as Annie, skipping with joy at the prospect of unhitching from the monstrous martinet, Councillor Parker (a bearish Marc Wootton). And I found myself almost cheering when the thoroughly decent, but oh so cowed, Herbert Soppitt (a pitch perfect Jim Howick) stands up to his controlling wife, Clara (Samantha Spiro having a lot of fun, scowling and howling).

There’s room for Ron Cook to channel Norman Wisdom as the inebriated photographer, Ormondroyd, and a vampish Tori Allen-Martin to underline her singing of “A little of what you fancy does you good” with some clear evidence that she continues to heed Marie Lloyd’s advice. There’s good work too in cameos from Reuben Joseph and Rowan Robinson as lovers who herald a less hypocritical future and Leo Wringer as a benign clergyman who adds a veneer of morality to a play that might have otherwise attracted disapproval from the moral guardians of 1938.

Seldom do shows like this gain awards, seen as too light and, perhaps with some justification, a little too formulaic for a venue like this. But that is to deny just how very, very difficult it is to execute comedy as skilfully as we see it done here.

More than that, it also denies just how important it is to assemble in a shared space and laugh together at the foibles of our common humanity. There’s no therapy can match that.

When We Are Married at The Donmar Warehouse until 7 February 2026