Twice filmed in the two decades following its composition, Sutton Vane’s 1923 play has not been seen in London in the half-century or so since the author’s death. Indeed, it was only seen originally due to Vane’s own staging after several producers had turned it down. Although it subsequently proved a hit, one can understand the initial uncertainty. How to market a play in which seven passengers meet in the lounge of an ocean liner and gradually realise that they are dead and on their way to the hereafter, where an Examiner will determine whether they are to go to heaven or hell?
    
At this distance in time, it feels rather like a pre-echo of J.B. Priestley, but like an uneasy mix of the divergent strands of that author’s stage work. The situation vaguely recalls Johnson Over Jordan and the mood of the “time” plays, but the treatment of the various characters bears more resemblance to the kind of comedy of manners which we now find at best quaint. There are the crashingly snobbish widow and her garrulous working-class counterpart; the brusque, self-praising businessman; the well-meaning but watery parson; the affable dipsomaniac who turns out to have more spine than anyone. With the third-act arrival of the Examiner, these figures are judged not just implicitly through the writing but overtly, as if there had been any doubt that the values being endorsed throughout were those of middle-class paternalism (with, later, just a whiff of English anti-Semitism).
    
Director Louise Hill and her cast allow these shifts of tone their own head, which is probably wiser than trying to iron out the wrinkles; Alex Marker’s ingenious design seats several of the audience in the lounge itself. Nicholas Karimi quickly establishes the boozy Prior as the flawed-viewpoint character, and it is a compliment that one wants to thump Carmen Rodriguez within a couple of minutes for the arrogance of Mrs Cliveden-Banks. Natalie Walter and Tom Davey inject a degree of uncertainty as a couple who keep mysteriously apart from the others, but ultimately even their plot runs on rails as their double suicide is uncovered. All told, this is more towards the “curio” end of the spectrum of the Finborough’s programme of revivals of forgotten works.

Written for the Financial Times.