Last week – on Valentine’s Day in fact – I booked tickets for Another Country, Julian
Mitchell’s famous public school play. Set in the 1930s, it’s the story of a
group of public schoolboys struggling to work out what they believe in after
the suicide of a fellow pupil rocks the school.
I was lucky enough to see the play in the West End thirty
years ago, when it starred a young Rupert Everett and an even younger Kenneth Branagh. So I had high hopes for the production by the weirdly-named student
company Screw the Looking Glass – and I wasn’t disappointed.
But two performances towered over the rest at the Oxford
Playhouse. The actors playing the parts taken by Everett and
Branagh 30 years ago were by turns charismatic and moving, insightful and
funny. I found myself gripped whenever they were onstage, not quite so gripped
when they weren't.
I stupidly hadn’t bought a programme so when I got home I
checked out who these fine young actors were and nearly fell off my chair in
surprise. The actor playing Guy Bennett (based on spy-in-the-making Guy Burgess) was none other than Peter Huhne, a
second-year languages student at Oxford and the son of former cabinet minister
Chris Huhne. As virtually the whole world knows, the student’s bitter text
messages to his father were read out in court following Chris Huhne’s guilty
plea for perverting the course of justice and were plastered across the papers for
days afterwards.
Huhne Junior is only 20 but talk about impressive. How on
earth he got through the media firestorm, carried on with his studies and gave
a towering performance like this I don’t know. But then again, as all great
actors know, the show must go on.
PS. The other fine performance was by Jo Allan, as Bennett's Marxist sympathiser friend Tommy Judd.
PS. The other fine performance was by Jo Allan, as Bennett's Marxist sympathiser friend Tommy Judd.
