Customer Reviews

In Celebration

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This is a beautiful play, gorgeously written by David Storey, marvelously directed by Lindsay Anderson, and beautifully well-acted by the incomparable Alan Bates and company. Brian Cox, in one of his first performances, plays one of the tortured sons of a working-class family that has never come to grips with the loss of the first son, nor ever admitted the mother's attempted suicide. Together now for the parents' 40th anniversary, the three surviving sons want both to confront the parents with the truth and to let the past go. Drunk and tired, they argue over the past, one trying to smooth things over while the other stirs things up. The play is masterfully conceived. It is tight, plotted according to Aristotle's strictest codes of singularity and brevity. The entire company drawn from the famous Royal Court is superb, but it is especially gratifying to see the late Sir Alan Bates and the young Cox, who has matured into such a formidable character actor. Landau's filmed theatre series is one of the treasures of the 20th century.

Interesting, well acted (by Alan Bates, Brian Cox among others) study of a dysfunctional working class English family where the three sons have become educated and moved up in the world, but are still held back emotionally by the wounds of childhood. Feels very stagy, and some of the writing is too theatrical for film, but much of it is moving and nicely complex; interestingly combining the personal and the political.