Ruth Leon recommends…More Performances to Knock your Socks Off

Home – Gielgud and Richardson 

 Here are two of the greatest performances I ever saw in the same play. John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson (Sirs, both) in David Storey’s elegant and compassionate Home, a beautiful, almost painterly play in which two elderly gentlemen meet on a terrace and greet each other courteously.

They discuss topics including the past, the weather, old friends, moustache-styles, and the war. Are they perhaps in a small private hotel? But all is not quite what it seems, and gradually we realize we are actually on the grounds of a mental hospital, and these old men are patients.

With astonishingly sparse dialogue, by the time the day is over and the shadows fall, we are moved to warmth, sympathy, and respect for these extraordinarily ordinary men and endless admiration for the playwright. Alert for American readers. This is about as English, not British, not universal, a play as exists in the theatrical literature. Some of the dialogue is unspoken, sub-textual, and you have to be attuned to the rhythm of their conversation to hear it.

You have to be of a certain age to remember the exquisite and highly eccentric actor, Ralph Richardson. He belonged to the era and acting style of Charles Laughton,  Michael Redgrave and Laurence Olivier and was, in his day, equally famous. I saw him several times when I was a starstruck kid and he knocked me out each time.

John Gielgud was, no contest, the most revered member of perhaps the greatest generation of actors the world has ever known. To see these two acting giants together in David Storey’s remarkable play in which neither wastes or throws away a single word of Storey’s elliptical dialogue is a treat not to be missed.

Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson starred in the London and New York productions of Home, which opened in June 1970 at the Royal Court Theatre. That year it won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play of the Year.

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