A very British scandal

It starts off like a classic drawing room comedy of the period – a chap dressed in morning suit coming out with bons mots to his attractive wife – but, under Sean Mathias’s assured captaincy, it gradually descends into something a lot darker and bleaker.

Will Trenting – preparing for his trip to Buckingham Palace – turns out to have unwittingly had sex with an underage girl at an orgy and the press have got wind of it. His wife Rona knows all about it – they have a pioneering open marriage – and the pair, realising the knighthood has magnified interest in the story a hundredfold, move as best they can into damage limitation mode.

As the couple at the epicentre of the scandal, Ayden Callaghan and Honeysuckle Weeks look suitably anguished, but the most compelling turns are from Louis Holland as their bewildered son Ian, David Phelan as Trenting’s smooth publisher and Narinder Samra as a character without any redeeming features whatsoever called Daker (would all those who sniggered on the first night please note that the surname of the Daily Mail grandee is not spelt with a ‘k’ but a ‘c’?)

There are vague hints that Trenting is occasionally also attracted to his own sex – Emlyn Williams was himself bisexual – and Accolade thus almost certainly belongs to a genre of plays that also includes works by Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables) and Noel Coward (Design for Living) in that laws in place when they were written have frustrated in their true intent.

Still, the piece has a lot to say not just about a marriage of convenience, but also snobbery, an establishment that can always be relied upon to protect itself and a underclass that will always have to struggle for justice. Essential, thought-provoking and still uncomfortably relevant theatre.