Historical fun

Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Blood Of Others as a novel in 1945, but playwright Simon Bent, who adapted it in 1986, has set his version in Paris in 1958, on the eve of Charles de Gaulle's election victory.

Jean, a committed socialist who worked for the resistance during World War II, is watching the victory parade from his attic room in a dilapidated hostel.

The triumph of the right doesn't just signify the collapse of the ideals for which he risked his life during the war. It also becomes a personal disaster as Jean's political disillusionment, fury and frustration are irrevocably bound up with the guilt and anguish he feels over HèlËne, a pragmatist with whom he had a brief, problematic relationship during the war.

Charlotte Gwinner cleverly articulates the existential proximity of the political and the personal in her production, carefully directing the constant narrative switches between Jean's affair with HèlËne and his troubled conversations with the hostel's chambermaid Sandrine as though they were part of the same anguished internal dialogue.

It's hard, however, not to recoil slightly from the heavy weather Garry Cooper makes of Jean's crisis of despair, even though cool, coherent performances from Georgia Mackenzie's HèlËne (pictured with Cooper) and Lucy Rivers's Sandrine do provide some effective relief.

More comedy could also have been wrenched from Susan Travers's ageing concierge, but Gwinner achieves a modest triumph in making the play's ideas about social responsibility speak to a modern audience.

The Blood Of Others