Rebecca A Johnson

This Happy Breed; Henry IV, Parts One and Two – review

. It has rarely been revived. Written in 1939, as an outraged response to the Munich agreement and a "tribute to John Citizen", it shows two families reeling and recovering from the first world war, who move with various degrees of awareness towards the second. It offers, as Stephen Unwin's nimble production makes clear, a minor revelation about Coward's work. It contains not a single cigarette holder or cocktail shaker; it does feature Wincarnis, fish paste and "Pale Hands I Loved Beneath the Shalimar".

In the first production, Coward took the part of Frank, a soldier, survivor and cautious character, married to Ethel, who turns from a girl who's very pleased not to be a war widow into a woman who produces gales of mirth when she gives her sloshed hubby a wigging in her dressing-gown, and who is last seen as a stiff-jointed, stalwart granny. Frank says: "Don't worry, old girl, it'll all come out in the wash." She tells him not to be silly if he tries to kiss her. They have a Bolshevik-inclined son-in-law, a bit of a brush with the General Strike, a daughter who, when she scarpers with a married man, sends them a letter with a French stamp ("disgusting"), a neighbour married to a woman who has "upsets", and an elderly mother with a bag and a hat and a grumpy turn of phrase. By far the most interesting character seems to have dropped in from an adjacent world. Frank's sour sister in middle age suddenly takes up Christian Science and an older woman: oh, the relief when she (played with ironic dash by Jayne McKenna) finally gets into her stride in her slacks.

Enjoyably plotted, sometimes dextrously turned, but groaning with moral sententiousness, This Happy Breed is peppered with moments in which characters proclaim the importance of using their own words, of not slipping into jargon, in particular the second-hand vocabulary of 1930s socialism. Yet sentence after sentence in the dialogue is so well-worn that it's threadbare: a patchwork of salt-of-the-earth, reach-me-down cockney phrases. "Ere's 'opin," Coward seems to have thought, that if I string enough of them together I'll come up with something about Ooman Naitcher. Well, 'op it.

Coward took the title of This Happy Breed ) offer variations on history and inheritance, fathers and sons, nostalgia and fear of the future.

The two parts of Henry IV may be billed as historical or political plays, but the vibrancy is in the individuals: in the waning of personal power, the way one generation lives through the next and another only in its own past. What will matter for most people is Hal and Hotspur and their dads, Justices Shallow and Silent, and Falstaff.