Jun 12, 2006

Call it a trifle. Call it a morsel of catnip for Anglophiles. But don't let the title put you off. "Nothing," a new play at the 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, may not be a big thing, but it is very distinctly something.

It is a flavorful adaptation, by Andrea Hart, of a novel of the same name by Henry Green, a British writer little known in the United States today and somewhat hard to classify. He has been compared to Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, but the style he evolved, in a series of novels published from 1926 to 1952, is more fluid and modernist: now dreamy and distant, now intimate and gimlet-eyed, essentially naturalistic but trimmed in mysterious imagery.

"Nothing," published in 1950, was written mostly in dialogue, which would seem to have made Ms. Hart's job easier. But Green's dialogue is so natural in its flow, so lightly acidic in its humor and so subtly evocative of character that it must have been hard to choose what to excise and what to include.

Ms. Hart has done a superlative job of distillation, losing little of the comedy or the characterization, although naturally what emerges stealthily and delicately on the page sometimes gains a blunter, more brassy tone onstage. Originally directed by Robert David MacDonald at the Citizens' Theater in Glasgow in 2003, this production has been restaged with economy and precision by Philip Prowse.

The novel's plot is perfectly contoured for a stage comedy of manners. The flow of incident unfolds through conversations taking place in restaurants, cafes and parlors, over glasses of wine and, more often than not, unsatisfactory meals. It tells of the string of upheavals that a romance in one generation causes in another.

The middle-aged John Pomfret (Simon Dutton) and Jane Wetherby (Sophie Ward) are proud members of the British upper class. Slightly tattered by the economic ravages of postwar Britain, they still take for granted the perquisites of their class - well-trained servants, well-cut clothes - and are disconcerted when they are not forthcoming.

They are also dismayed by the seriousness of their adult children, Mary Pomfret (Candida Benson) and Philip Wetherby (Pete Ashmore), who work in the same branch of the civil service and have struck up a sober friendship that gradually, somewhat unexcitingly, leads to a marriage proposal.

Complicating matters is the history between their parents, former lovers who still take things like sex and romance in stride, as members of their class and their generation always have. (Do the math. They were the fabled Bright Young Things once.)

"Your whole generation's hopeless," Jane snaps to her son. "You're prudes." The youngsters, meanwhile, cling to probity and despair of their parents' "unbridled" behavior. This reversal of the expected attitudes of parents and children provides the play's comic underpinnings.

Ms. Ward, who possesses an angular but delicate beauty that recalls the young Maggie Smith, has the liveliest role as the casually catty, daintily self-dramatizing Jane. She opposes the marriage and describes Mary blithely, at one point, as "very sweet, I know, but a simpleton without a penny and not even pretty." (This to Philip, Mary's fiancé, no less.) Mr. Dutton's John exudes the smooth self-satisfaction of a man who has never had to work very hard, in business or elsewhere, to get his way, complain though he does of the dreary grind of life and his hopeless poverty.

Ms. Hart glowers softly and tipples amusingly as John's casual girlfriend Liz Jennings, who is gradually supplanted in his life by Jane, as plans for the impending marriage renew the intimacy between the ex-lovers. Liz takes comfort in vilifying her rival to their mutual friend Richard (Derwent Watson).

Although it looks a bit cramped, Mr. Prowse's production moves along briskly. But it is possible to conceive of a more refined approach to this material, which provides a slyly devastating portrait of fancy British folk at their most frivolous and self-absorbed. The actors sometimes overstate the comic payoffs in the dialogue, or telegraph emotional notes too obviously; the contrast between the decorousness of the characters' talk and the ruthlessness of their behavior gets a bit blurry.

Jane's bitchiness glistens a little too brightly in Ms. Ward's cool performance, for example; better to let us discover more gradually the razor blades hidden in her effusions of chatter. And Ms. Benson's Mary is more frumpy and pitiable than seems strictly necessary. (In any case the younger characters are less well defined in both the novel and the play.)

Nothing is notably amiss, but the scintillating spark that perfectly pitched performances can give to, say, Noël Coward comedies is not really in evidence either. Still, the performances are effective, giving their due to the pleasing tickle of Green's dialogue and the niceties of his plotting.

And the cruel fun of watching John and Jane as they blithely let their own prerogatives usurp those of their beloved children is irresistible. In the final scene John turns to Jane and says, with a sublimely funny lack of self-awareness: "Well, Jane, our children will just have to work their own lives out. We can't do everything for them." When in fact what they have done is a lot closer to, well, nothing.

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