Claire Evans on Directing the first London Revival of Home at Seven

Marking the 50th anniversary of the death of writer RC Sherriff with its first London revival since its 1950 West End premiere, Home at Seven is a psychological mystery following a man who returns home to find he’s been missing for 24 hours. As hard as he tries, he cannot recall the events of the missing day or explain away evidence that implicates him in a theft and murder. Set five years after the end of the Second World War when the people of Britain are recovering from six years of an altered norm, director Claire Evans’ interpretation explores themes of lost time and the lies we tell to keep up appearances and protect our sense of normalcy. We chatted to Claire about the revival which will play at Tabard Theatre before touring the Elmbridge area supported by the RC Sherriff Trust.

This is the first London revival of Home at Seven since its 1950 premiere. Why do you think it resonates with today’s audiences?

Modern audiences still enjoy a traditional mystery drama and on one level Home at Seven offers exactly that. On another, it explores how human beings deal with loss and readjustment and the way in which we deceive ourselves as we try and manage our normality. The play was written five years after the end of the second World War when the country was still in recovery, dealing with rationing and processing the six years in which everything had been turned upside down. I saw in that some resonance with our own times, having so recently gone through the collective national trauma of 2020.

RC Sherriff is best known for Journey’s End. How does Home at Seven showcase a different side of his writing?

Journey’s End, written in 1928, was Sherriff’s reflection on and response to the lived experience of the horrors of the first World War. The National Theatre included it in their 100 most influential pieces of theatre of the 20th Century.  Home at Seven, written over 20 years later, is a very different type of play offering a very different response to the Second World War. Sherriff here is taking a popular genre of the day, the mystery thriller, and through it is examining the post war landscape in which people are still struggling to climb out of the restrictions imposed by the War. The play turns upon the little lies we tell ourselves and each other to maintain the fragile veneer of civilised life and how small deceptions can detonate and overturn our everyday existence. It is a small lie Preston tells out of fear for his future and in an endeavour to cling on to the ordinariness of life that propels the plot and the nightmare in which he finds himself.

Sherriff’s writing blends psychological mystery with domestic realism. How did you balance these elements in your staging?

The loss of memory suffered by the central character, David Preston, is at the heart of the story. Like any well-made play of its era, the action unfolds within the confines of a single set room, in this case a living room. We wanted to be able to suggest the psychological elements of the play through our set design choices. The box-set is incomplete, echoing the gaping void in Preston’s memory and the more general sense of loss, the missing and broken following the years of the War.

Lost time is a deeply unsettling concept. How are you and the actors working together to portray the emotional and psychological impact of such an experience? 

While the experience of Covid and the Lockdowns is not the same as enduring a six-year war, the pandemic was nonetheless a collective national trauma that we all went through. It is too soon perhaps to analyse the long-term effects of social distancing, isolation and coping with restrictions on our liberty but, at the five year mark, people are beginning to reflect. In Home at Seven we see very ordinary people finding they are having to navigate their way through some extraordinary events, all of which are catalysed by a response Preston suffers because of his experience during the War. Everything comes back to that and there is a sense that lives are still on hold. During the rehearsal process we have drawn on our own lived experiences of what happened personally to each of us during Covid and Lockdown and used it as an emotional reference to enter into the world of the play and its characters.

In the original script the ending of the play feels slightly unsatisfactory. It simply ends. In the film of the play, made two years later, the director opted to end it with a loving coming together of Preston and his wife, and an amusing scene involving the Inspector and chrysanthemums in a car. I too feel the scripted ending does not serve the play as well as it might.  I wanted the ending to both conclude the play and, at the same time, draw the audience into the emotional intensity that has been building throughout the piece and to mine the human depths that absolutely lurk beneath the needs of the plot and the demands of a mystery drama.

Given the play’s original West End run in the 1950s, have you preserved elements of the original production style, or are you adapting aspects to make them feel more contemporary?

I decided to keep the play in the year it was written as it is specifically of that time with the references to rationing, the difficulty of getting clothes, the requirement to carry ID cards and so forth. I have however worked to peel back the layers that are certainly there in the writing and to elevate it from being merely a mystery drama last seen in London 75 years ago, to a theatre piece that still speaks to a modern audience.

What do you hope audiences take away from Home at Seven?

First and foremost, I would like audiences to enjoy seeing this play, many for the first time ever. Sherriff is a skilled writer and the play works as a psychological thriller of its era.

The unflappable Inspector Hemingway in the play muses about the terrifying ordeal in which Preston finds himself, “it’s one of those things that might happen to anyone”. That is quietly chilling. Big world events do have a habit of coming along and happening to us. We are left having to put our lives back together again and processing the loss of time and of life.  In the 80th anniversary year of VE Day and its heady celebrations of the end of World War II, Home at Seven is a poignant reflection on how things went once the bunting was taken down and streets cleared of party debris. At the end of the covid chapter, there was no bunting or party, just a sense of everything having shifted.

Home at Seven plays at the Tabard Theatre from the 2^nd – 20^th September and will tour Elmbridge from 27^th September – 3^rd October. Tickets available at tabard.org.uk