Epitaph for George Dillon

One of my favourite theatre venues in London is the Comedy Theatre, where on Wednesday I caught the matinee performance of Epitaph for George Dillon. Starring the striking Francesca Annis (who was just as brilliant as she was when I saw her in an Ibsen production a couple of years ago) and Joseph Fiennes, it was an interesting play for a couple of reasons.

There was an audible gasp from the female members of the audience when Joseph Fiennes walked on stage and though he's a fantastic actor, I couldn't get past the fact that he was kissing his sister-in-law on stage. While the play was written before Look Back in Anger, it didn't premiere until two years after the latter play's great success. It seemed to me like a warm-up for the alienation and asphixiating nature of the social climate of the 1950s that we all now recognize as being classic John Osborne. But there was something also a little different - whether this was due to the fact that the play was co-written by the largely forgotten Anthony Creighton or to the inexperience of an emerging voice is unknown. An interesting academic paper maybe, but I'm a little busy at the moment.