The Donmar’s current production opens in a naval hospital with heavy overtones of an asylum. A man is being interrogated by a white-coated doctor – gently, at first, though they both get increasingly agitated. We, and the doctor, learn that Gene can remember what he had for breakfast, and dinner the night before, and what film they screened at the hospital last week, and key political events of January and the name of the US President. But he can’t remember where he grew up, or what he was called as a child, or even – to his doctor’s disbelief – if he was fond of Cheese Puffs. He can’t remember anything from before the war at all.
Fittingly for a play that centres around the idea of reinvention – and the question of if such a thing is ever really possible – Welcome Home, Captain Fox! started life in a different language and setting as the 1937 Jean Anouilh play, Le Voyageur sans Bagage. Anouilh’s original was set in a post-wartime France, the protagonist an amnesiac WW1 soldier trying to unearth his identity and horrified by what he finds.
This adaptation by Anthony Weigh shifts the action to Long Island in the 1950’s – to the home of the wealthy, neurotic Foxes, brought face-to-face suddenly, by the charitable efforts of Mrs Dupont-Dufort, with a man who may or may not be the Jack Fox they believed died eighteen years before.
Initially Gene’s as eager to have found his home as the Foxes are doubtful that it’s rightfully his. But as the play unfolds we see him starting to pick apart the tangle of Jack’s history: his mother’s froideur, his brother’s ire, his sister-in-law’s loaded stares and some truly sinister keepsakes from his youth – and starts to realise that the connections and identity he’s been hoping to find might prove to be a chokehold he can’t break.
In the course of the play – that’s a hefty two and a half hours, though for the most part the buoyancy of the staging stops it from dragging – we see each new, cruel clue to Jack Fox that Gene unearths pushing him further and further from the man he wanted to believe himself, and each answer leading him to more questions. Why are the Foxes so sure he belongs with them? Is not having a home at all better than one filled with resentment, hostility and amateur taxidermy? And what responsibility does he bear for the faults of Jack Fox – a man he can’t remember being?
Weigh’s adaptation circles constantly around those questions, and the transplant to Cold War-era America gives an interesting context for a play where identity is something more often forced onto its characters by each other. Mrs Dupont-Dufort’s frankness that she’s chosen the Foxes for Gene out of 23 possible families – because she considers them the most well-bred – becomes aggrieved incredulity that he might make equally calculated choices about the past and future he lays claim to, to different purpose than hers.
These are weighty themes, and every character in Welcome Home, Captain Fox! is both devastated and devastating each other in their own ways. But the overriding feel of the production is comic. Often sweet. Occasionally slapstick, with an edge – one of the funniest and most chaotic scenes coming when Mrs Fox decides to reunite her traumatised, pacifist son with his long-lost hunting rifle. Sometimes the jauntiness of the script threatens to drown out some of the bleaker nuance: James, the butler (played by Trevor Laird), offers Gene a short and crushing insight into what it really means to be powerless to shape your future, one of many flashes of despair poking through the script that don’t always feel properly mined.
But the strengths of the production far outweigh the occasional sense of hustle to the pace. Key among them the cast, consistently strong – with a dazzlingly unpleasant turn from Siân Thomas as the chilly, relentless Mrs Fox, and a moving one from Barnaby Kay as George Fox, caught between feelings of protectiveness and hurt towards his little brother Jack. The direction’s flawless as well: forthright and simple enough not to overwhelm the Donmar’s small, seats-nearly-on-stage space; energetic enough to make two and a half hours feel too short. It’s an impressive feat for a play dealing with war, cruelty, oppression and infidelity to leave you feeling warmed but it’s one that McIntyre’s staging of Welcome Home, Captain Fox! achieves in bright, brash, Fifties spades.
Welcome Home, Captain Fox! is at the Donmar Warehouse, 41, Earlham Street, London, WC2H 9LX, until 16th April 2016. For more information and tickets visit the website.
