More than 20 years after the Westminster Theatre fell into disuse, the area between Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station once again hosts a medium-sized playhouse. At 312 seats, the St James Theatre’s main house is less than half the size of its predecessor, but the venue also offers a 100-seat studio. Indeed, it is not dissimilar to the Trafalgar Studios just under a mile to the north-east, in terms both of respective capacities and of main-house configuration. The St James, too, is a kind of indoor amphitheatre, perhaps even more vertiginously raked than Trafalgar Studio 1. With a single bare table onstage before the commencement of its opening production, it reminded me somewhat of a large medical lecture theatre.
    
Its acoustics, however, seem excellent; at least, I infer as much from the frequent impression in the early scenes of Bully Boy that the two players were unnecessarily bellowing at each other. This may, I suppose, be a deliberate decision by director Patrick Sandford to emphasise the characters’ antagonism and their military milieu, but it really isn’t necessary. Anthony Andrews plays a wheelchair-bound major from the Falklands generation tasked with investigating the death of a young boy at the hands of Joshua Miles’ unit in today’s Middle East. Over the course of 95 minutes or so the two come to understand implicitly that, separated though they are by age, class, theatre of operations and countless other factors, they share (and share with countless others) the grim experience of combat and post-combat stress.
    
Sandi Toksvig’s script is thoughtful and well-judged, and elicits the finest stage performance I have seen from Andrews. Miles, in only his second production since graduating from drama school, proves a fine foil to him, often visibly trembling with the character’s tension (or perhaps the actor was just astutely putting opening-night nerves to good use). Toksvig neither tub-thumps to deliver her message nor sets her characters to seduce us; it is a little surprising to find ourselves engaging so much with figures who had at first seemed little more than a prig and a thug. With what looks in prospect like a solid opening programme and also boasting a brasserie and separate bar, the St James has high ambitions to secure a place on central London’s theatrical circuit; time will tell.
     
Written for the Financial Times.