4000 Miles: Eileen Atkins’s old Leftist eccentric lacks a little puff
It’s apt that 4000 Miles has opened in the wake of the WHO ceasing to classify Covid as a global emergency. Of all the productions that got stuck in the pipeline, this feels most like a marker of the distance travelled in three years.
A revival of Amy Herzog’s 2010 play was planned for the Old Vic in 2020, with Timothée Chalamet making his UK theatrical debut opposite Eileen Atkins – playing a young American who crashes at the Greenwich Village pad of his nonagenarian grandma after a grimly disastrous coast to coast cycling trip.
After much postponement, defeat was admitted last year, yet Dame Eileen, 88, remained keen and approached Chichester to pursue the project, enlisting Richard Eyre, who has directed her on several notable occasions, to stage it. So, lo, here it is, sans Chalamet and instead with British actor Sebastian Croft in the interloper role of Leo, whose slacker attitude riles and beguiles Vera, the old woman, and also belies an inner lostness that tallies with hers. While Croft doesn’t have smouldering star wattage, the fact that he had a strong supporting role in the TV hit Heartstopper affirms he’s quite a catch.
Even so, there isn’t sufficient vitality, comic or otherwise, in the scenes the callow youth has with the trio of female characters, completed by a resentful girlfriend called Bec and a casual hook-up called Amanda, who, being Chinese, bitterly bridles at the revelation that Vera remains a card-carrying Commie (“A lot of people were communists back then – it was like... recycling, or whatever,” Leo goofily suggests).
Croft could do with being more heedless and hormonal, less clean-cut and contained. And despite lasting only 90 minutes, the evening oddly drags a little. That’s partly the meandering text, aping the imprecision of ordinary chat and old age’s groping for words. But while Atkins offers a touching frailty, a forgetful, fretful aura too, the spry tenacity and good humour that Sara Kestelman brought to the UK premiere a decade ago seem too absent. And that New York accent sometimes bears passing traces of the Big Smoke.
You’ll want to see it, all the same. A vast, enviably lovely bookcase aside (the designer is Peter McKintosh), there’s something for the annals simply in witnessing Atkins’s staying power, both career-wise and with this particular project. She elicits, for real, the admiration that Herzog invested in her affectionate portrait of her grandma Leepee. And perhaps like Leo, the production just needs a bit more time – funny after such a long wait – to bed in.
Until June 10. Tickets: 01243 781312; cft.org.uk
