“But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.” It makes the genre sound frightfully progressive. There is, of course, the older definition that melodrama offers a crude division between good and evil, whereas tragedy is a conflict between right and right. Even excellent actors like David Calder and Matthew Marsh can do little, as the scheming siblings, but stand around looking shifty and overfed.A better play would allow them to hint at what it is they are compensating for in their commercial rapacity. And while Brid Brennan is wonderfully moving as the nervous bird-like aristocrat one of the brothers bagged, there’s a crude lack of ambiguity in their marital relationship Lopakhin’s feelings towards the old order were torn. Here, it seems, getting wed to a toff affects nothing but the bank balance.All the more credit then to Miss Wilton for the emotional hinterland she suggests in Regina.

Winning and witty early on, she lets you see, too, the disappointment and frustration that drives this woman, who was left nothing in her father’s will and had to marry wealth. She and Peter Guinness (as her dying husband) conjure up an almost palpable atmosphere of alienated misery in their awkward scenes together. Here the sequence where Regina fails to help when her spouse fatally drops his medicine bottle is redeemed from hokiness by the intensity of the cloudy bleak distraction in which Wilton seems wrapped. You can’t see the point at which inattention turns into criminal calculation.My sense of musical history may be playing me false here, but it sounds like jumping the gun a bit to have the blues playing between scenes and to make ragtime the choice of entertain- ment for a visiting Chicago industrialist. This is the only jarring detail, though, in a production that dresses mutton very convincingly as lamb.To 24 November (020-7369 1732). “Im normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other.

What do you say about my daughters? Isn’t it very sad?” Mary S Lovell has taken David Mitford’s complaint to heart She has a lot to say about his daughters. But after decades (it seems) of books on those mad, bad and sometimes dangerous-to-know girls, do we want to hear it?The six Mitford girls pursued lives which are footnotes to 20th-century history: Nancy, the socialist aristocrat, gentle satirist of the society she yet delighted in; Unity, conceived in the Ontario town of Swastika, destined to become Hitler’s pet; Diana, whose marriage to Oswald Mosley set her at the fringes of acceptability; Decca, who ended up as a fiery Communist ?gr?n California; Pam, the country girl who married a scientist and lived quietly in Gloucestershire; and Debo, who declared her intention, and carried out the act, of marrying a duke.
By drawing on new sources, Lovell presents a fresh version of the Mitford story. She fleshes out “Muv” and Farve” – the fictional Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie of Nancy’s novels – and adds to our understanding of their progeny. David Mitford, “the most handsome man of his generation” according to James Lees-Milne, is as eccentric as his fictional portrait in The Pursuit of Love. He did regard almost all his daughters’ suitors as “sewers”; but the word was Tamil, “soor”, meaning pig.