BWW Reviews: FOR SERVICES RENDERED, Union Theatre, July 15 2011

First performed 79 years ago, W Somerset Maugham's "For Services Rendered" (at the Union Theatre until 23 July) often shows its age - "It's a bit like Eastenders, only they're speaking nicely and drinking tea" said my 14 year-old son. At times it may feel a little dated, but it's subject matter is horribly contemporary with businesses failing in a recession over which politicians seem helpless, despite their rhetoric; old certainties crumbling as progress progresses into reverse; older men chasing younger women, who are keen to use the men's wealth and foolhardiness to spur their own ambition. Everyone is trapped by their own sensitivity or insensitivity, their own selfishness or unselfishness, the choices they made without full knowledge of the consequences. It's a black comedy for those, and these, dark times.

The Ardsley family are well off, living in a large house outside a small town, but tiring of continually seeing their own faces and those of their narrow circle of friends, a group circumscribed by the still largely impassable class boundaries of provincial inter-war England. The centre cannot hold however, and its first fractures appear when 33 year-old Eva unsuccessfully throws herself at war-hero and failing businessman, Collie, who rails against a nation that took his best years (those "services rendered" in the Navy) then cast him off with just enough money, but not enough knowledge, to set up a garage that the banks will support no longer with loans. Younger sister Lois has caught the eye of ageing Lothario, Wilfred, whom she comes to realise can be her meal ticket out of an otherwise inevtiable following of Eva's path to old maidhood or other sister Ethel's path to getting by in a marriage gone stale. Observing these scenes with a keen ear and keener intellect, having been blinded in the trenches, is the Ardsleys' only son, Sydney, whose acerbic comments on wartime service and the futile emptiness of much of post-war life, must have done much to provoke the ice-cool reception the work received back in the 1930s. The play's other observer is the elderly Mrs Ardsley, blessed with all the insight and sensitivity that her husband lacks and, eventually, free to prove it.

Vital Signs Theatre's production is taut, at times uncomfortable, but wonderfully relevant for 2011 audiences, living through uncertain times. There are fine performances right through the ensemble cast, with Benjamin Noble's doomed Collie and JoNathan Peck's sightlessly perceptive Sydney the standouts. Sure there's a bit of clunky exposition in a first act that sets the scene for the second act's reckonings, but director James Bounds keeps the pace high and successfully creates a prison cell from a comfortable conservatory in rural England. That conservatory, and the attitudes that trapped its residents, were soon to be blown away forever by the second act of the bigger drama the first act of which ran from 1914 to 1918.  

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