Ruth Leon recommends… Dear Octopus – National Theatre at Home

Dear Octopus – National Theatre at Home

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The writer Dodie Smith  is best known for her children’s novel 101 Dalmations, a love letter to her own dogs, and also for I Capture The Castle,  a nostalgic novel written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley, a conscientious objector, moved from their native England to California. That book, informed by their homesickness for England, was a coming of age novel in the form of the diary of a young girl about a family trying to make ends meet in genteel poverty near a castle.

But Dodie Smith was also a playwright. Her most successful play, Dear Octopus, was also about a family but a very different kind of family. This play is now available online.

The National Theatre‘s new production of Dear Octopus, Dodie Smith’s 1938 family drama, stars Lindsay Duncan as the matriarch of a family “from whose tentacles we can never quite escape”.

When a golden wedding anniversary reunites the Randolph family on the eve of WWII, Dora and Charles must reckon with the adults their children have become. Their children, meanwhile, are haunted by the memory of the family they once were.

The original 1938 London production was a huge hit. It ran for 376 performances before transferring to New York and featured Dame Marie Tempest and Sir John Gielgud as Dora and Charles.

On this National Theatre showing, it looks like being just as big a hit this time around.

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