JB Priestley’s Roundabout had its premiere in Liverpool 1932 and there was a production by Cambridge undergraduates in 1935; and that was it, until Hugh Ross’s present enjoyable revival at Park Theatre, Finsbury. The comedy, very light and typical of its era, is given a quasi-intellectual edge with its facile satire at the expense of the bourgeoisie and the communists, who are in a state of economic and social confusion.
A bankrupt aristocrat is confronted by his estranged daughter (Bessie Carter) who returns from Russia as a keen communist with a male comrade (Steven Blakeley) in tow. She makes her entrance in shorts, dirty sweater and a large black beret, looking like a male mechanic in a third-rate garage; and very off-putting she is, too. Her dingy, sullen, scruffy, ugly commie boyfriend is even more off-putting.
