The great, dark, looming presence of the black cross – stage height – against a blood red background seemed to herald the doing away with nods and winks as far as the play’s religious content was concerned.  This was an unambiguous statement.  Here was Big Brother about to do his worst. The book, which has sprawled across our television screens, launching theatrical careers into the bargain, and found champions on the big screen, is not short of themes, religion and (ironically) the doom of the upper classes being but two.  In this offering from the English Touring Theatre via the York Theatre Royal, writer, Bryony Lavery, has cast her net wide over Waugh’s novel, hauling in as much as a two-hour sojourn in the theatre can tolerate.  The result is rather like one of those sushi bars in which the food meanders around on a conveyor belt allowing diners to grab anything that takes their fancy until they have had their fill – for which in this case two hours was more than generous.

The consequent surfeit of material has perhaps tempted director, Damian Cruden, into mixing and matching styles.  On the one hand, Caroline Harker as Lady Marchmain, gives a cut-glass performance of poise and effortless entitlement as the Jesuit in sheep’s clothing (‘We must make a Catholic out of Charles’), steering the Catholic family Flyte through choppy waters past the perilous rocks of Anglicanism and agnosticism.  On the other, Shuna Snow gives a brilliant turn playing a brace of chaps; elder brother Bridey Flyte, Sebastian’s languorous German companion, Kurt and swaggering braggart, Rex Mottram. Each is cleverly detailed in voice and movement and whilst not played for laughs here was the foundation of a truly novel take on a modern classic, which would have fully justified the transition to stage. It nearly skipped into comedy with some knockabout stuff around Marchmain’s deathbed, between the still agnostic Charles and Bridey over the whys and wherefores of the last rites and the need in that circumstance of a priest. But that was all too short an interlude.

Christopher Simpson as Sebastian flounces determinedly through proceedings as an aristocratic whinger with nothing better to do than try and cultivate friends of his own who were not to be seconded to the designs of the other members of his family. The narrator, Charles Ryder (Brian Ferguson), our dragoman through the corridors of Brideshead’s pre-war history, strikes the right note of common sense amidst the Flyte eccentricities.  Only his odd, final renunciation of doubt after the love of his life refuses to marry him on the grounds that it was a sin too far, came as a little too pat, tying things up with a little pink ribbon which left one feeling a little queasy.

The question one always needs to ask of literature cast into drama is ‘why’, but I’m not sure that this production gives a sufficiently convincing answer.   ★★★☆☆   Graham Wyles at Bath Theatre Royal on 4^th May 2016