Review: The Remains Of The Day, York Theatre Royal

THE Remains Of The Day is selling well, so much so you are advised to book promptly for the remainder of the tickets, not least because the run is short.

What's more, The Sunday Times' Culture magazine picked Out Of Joint and the Royal & Derngate Northampton touring co-production as one its three plays to see this week.

Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 novel was turned into a film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in 1993, at the peak of James Ivory's quintessentially English cinema brand.

It has taken rather longer for a stage version to emerge, but Barney Norris, novelist and playwright, now combines those skills in an elegant, eloquent adaptation – developed in collaboration with Ishiguro – that finds its own theatrical character to dissuade comparisons with the film.

Ishiguro's novel told the story of memory, regret and undeclared love from a first-person viewpoint, with Stevens, the long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, a stately pile near Oxford, as the narrator: a case of what the butler saw.

Norris does away with what can often be a clunky device on stage so while Stephen Boxer's Stevens is pretty much ever present, we observe him from the distance that he keeps from everyone in the line of inscrutable duty.

The scene, the Englishness of it all, is set before the play opens: persistent rainfall accompanies the audience taking their seats, the water glistening as we see it falling through the mirrored ornate screens that form Lily Arnold's mobile set design. Look out for the lines of bells too, capturing the essence of a grand house, just as Arnold caught the character of The Secret Garden at Theatre Royal last summer.

These screens allow for shifts between the stories' two timelines, the 1930s and 1950s, here overlapping so fluently that an actor can enter as one character from the Thirties, say a line and then transform into another character from the Fifties. This is what theatre has over film, and it is so pleasing to see the writer and director, Christopher Haydon, playing to theatre's timeless strengths for storytelling.

That story revolves around Niamh Cusack's housekeeper Kenton joining the Darlington Hall staff, forthright and frank and funny, whereas Boxer's reserved Stevens holds emotion in check at all times, even carrying out duties rather than being by his father's deathbed.

Such is his devotion to duty, blanking out the outside world, that he ignores the Nazi sympathies of Lord "The Appeaser" Darlington (Miles Richardson) and his anti-Semitic dismissal of two members of staff. Norris is not slow to nudge us into making comparisons with British politics and attitudes to Europe amid the Brexit malaise.

This is but one reason to enjoy theatre of the highest class, beautifully told, so English in its love story never fulfilled, with wonderful performances by Boxer and Cusack.

Charles Hutchinson