Orlando Bloom in In Celebration

There’s nowt, as someone might say in David Storey’s In Celebration, to celebrate amongst the tense, uneasy, fractured web of family relationships that the play lays bare, but its return to the West End is paradoxically a cause for rejoicing. It restores a major, but oddly neglected, writer to the heart of the theatrical landscape, and does so with a quietly moving production of meticulous care, attention and yes, love. The play itself reveals the frequent absence of affection, let alone love, in the home of a Northern miner, Mr. Shaw—a year shy of having spent the last fifty unhealthy years down the pit, as his constant coughing testifies. When he and his wife are visited by their three adult sons, returning home to celebrate their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, it uncovers the burdensome resentments and multiple echoes of past hurts that reverberate there.

But as it does so, it etches itself into the heart. Even if much of the attention that this production has received inevitably surrounds the celebrity casting of British movie actor Orlando Bloom, swapping swashbuckling movie pirates for something altogether more realistic, there’s also an integrity and intensity throughout the casting here that places him merely as a part of a finely-calibrated ensemble, not as a stand-out over it. In a play that tries to capture the pulse of real life so meticulously, that’s as it should be.

Bloom plays the first, and youngest, of the sons to arrive home. He therefore makes a solo appearance at the top of the play as he enters an empty living room but there is—thank God—no entrance applause. Instead, the cheers are saved for the curtain calls, when some of the audience’s attempts to take photographs are rigorously policed by armies of prowling ushers.

Tim Healy and Orlando Bloom in In Celebration

By then though, you won’t need to a photograph to remember this by, for this snapshot of family life has indelibly seared itself into the memory, even if memory itself taunts and haunts the characters here. Nearly 40 years on from its premiere at the Royal Court in 1969, the play is its own elegy to a way of life that has passed on, too: “Miles and miles of nothing, this place,” says Mr. Shaw. “Always has been, always will be. The only thing that ever came out of here was coal. And when that’s gone, as it will be, there’ll be even less. Row after row of empty houses, as far as the eye can see…It’s starting.”

And it ended, as we now know, in the tempestuous mid-‘80s conflict between Thatcher’s state and the miners. That situation is partly reflected in another current London production, Billy Elliot, in which the father initially resists the efforts of his talented young dancer son to break free of his background and pursue his dream. The dad in In Celebration (played by Billy Elliot's original dad Tim Healy, clearly carving a robust niche for himself as a miner) however, has worked hard to send his sons on different paths—which they are all failing at, whether as a solicitor (who gives it up to paint), a business negotiator (who is unmarried and has no personal life) or a writer (who can’t finish the book he is writing).

[AD]“Family, lad. Family. There’s nothing as important as that,” says Mr. Shaw. “A good wife: children. God’s good grace. If you have good health and your family, you don’t need anything else.” The irony, which this play exposes so hauntingly, is that he doesn’t have good health—and his family is a barely-functioning mess, too.

In Anna Mackmin’s beautifully felt production, which keenly articulates the sadness that underpins them, Bloom is joined by the wonderful Paul Hilton as his eldest brother Andrew (the former solicitor) and Gareth Farr as Colin, the negotiator whose professional skills can’t negotiate around the personal landmines that keep threatening to detonate in the family, particularly over an unspoken grief that forever haunts them all. As the mother, Dearbhla Molloy’s howl of anguish is ripped from the heart, in a play that ultimately rips your own apart.

In Celebration
By David Storey
Directed by Anna Mackmin
Duke of York’s Theatre, London