Welcome Home, Captain Fox!

by Anthony Weigh based on Jean Anouilh's Le Voyageur sans Bagage

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 26 March 2016

The play, directed by Blanche McIntyre, is an adaptation of Jean Anouilh's 1937 play concerning a returned soldier with amnesia. Anthony Weigh has reset it in the USA in the 1950s so that 'Gene' (Rory Keenan) has returned from the Second rather than the First World War. His blank state allows the people around him to reveal all sorts of secrets, prejudices and idiosyncrasies; in the end he manages to deploy some native cunning to escape from a less than ideal predicament.

The notion of an amnesiac returned soldier could be the springboard for an intense drama of loss, frustration and confusion, both for the soldier himself, and for those who may or may not recognise him as belonging to their family. In this play, such psychological scars and difficulties are mainly passed over in favour of social comedy. The Fox family do not seem to be traumatised by their loss, or deeply moved by the possibility that 'Gene' is in fact Jack Fox. They seem to feel that a fifteen year disappearance allows them not to be too much bothered emotionally. They are more exercised by dealing with the crass Dupont-Duforts (Kathleen Kingsley and Danny Webb) who have brought 'Gene' to meet them in the same way that they would bring a dog to its potential new owners.

The result is a witty and rather cynical comedy in which upper crust snobbery meets its match in pretentious social climbers, while the supposed centre of attention finds he does not want to be the man that Jack Fox was. When the pressure to give in threatens to become too great, a deus ex machina - or, rather more accurately, a deus ex armoire - arrives in the shape of a small boy looking for his nephew (a typically ludicrous situation) and his explanation suggests to 'Gene' the way out to a more fulfilling life.

The production is very stylish, as it needs to be for this sort of almost Noel Coward style of theatre. Rory Keenan presents a likeable hero, while Sian Thomas as Mrs Fox and Barnaby Kay and Fenella Woolgar as her son and daughter-in-law are suitably waspish, docile and alcoholic respectively as his putative family. While the serious issues of identity and memory are present they are nowhere near the surface, and this turns out to be perfectly acceptable.