After Priestley's Cornelius, the Finborough brings us another play about office life in the interwar years; and even if John Van Druten's 1931 piece doesn't have the state-of-the nation ambitions of its predecessor, it still has pertinent things to say about the exploitation of women, and is as rivetingly entertaining as you'd expect from the man who went on to write I Am a Camera.
Setting the action in a London Wall firm of solicitors, at a time when there were 2.7 million unemployed in the UK, Van Druten shows the situation many women faced: a life of low-wage drudgery as typists or secretaries from which matrimony offered the only escape. But Van Druten makes his points through character rather than sermons. In particular, he focuses on the dilemma faced by 19-year-old newcomer, Pat, who is pursued avidly by the office Casanova and rather less diligently by a downstairs shipping clerk. As a warning of the awful fate that may await her, we see her loyal senior, Miss Janus, still slaving away for three quid a week and ultimately deserted by her longtime lover.
What strikes me is how the commercial theatre of yesteryear acquires an archaeological fascination over time. And although Van Druten abides by the rules of the well-made play, he has some shrewd things to say about sexual double standards and the desire of the boss that every worker becomes "as nearly as possible an automaton or a machine". It helps that Tricia Thorns' production for Two's Company is brilliantly designed by Alex Marker and excellently cast. Maia Alexander as the gauche newcomer, Alix Dunmore as her older protector, Alex Robertson as the suave seducer and Marty Cruickshank as a litigious fusspot all impress in a play that reminds us of a lost era – when middlebrow drama had a social purpose.
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