Passion Play; The Match Box

How fashions change. Peter Nichols’s adultery drama, Passion Play, will seem tame and rather conventional to modern audiences. It was written in 1981 at a time when the rites and idioms of therapy hadn’t penetrated every level of our culture. Back then the candid scrutiny of one’s emotions, supervised by a ruminating analyst, was a thrilling and sophisticated novelty available only to high-earning fashion junkies. Today’s self-elevators choose different proofs of social altitude. They drink Bhutanese champagne, they purchase dachas in Moldova, or they holiday on the Great Barrier Reef in the family bathyscaphe.

Nichols sets his drama in a swish London suburb where James, an ageing art dealer, is seduced by Kate, a killer bimbo with a penchant for lovable old daddy-bears. David Leveaux’s production is stylish, snappy and great to look at. Owen Teale is pleasingly daft and vulnerable as the tousled rogue James. And Annabel Scholey is heart-thumpingly sexy as the granddad-grabber in a black suspender-belt.