“It’s a stockbroker’s wonderful life”
After a sell-out run at the Finborough Theatre, The White Carnation finds a new home at the Jermyn Street Theatre and has started a short run of three weeks. R.C. Sherriff’s story of a successful stockbroker’s life, which takes a supernatural twist, has waited sixty years for its first revival and this skilled production serves it well.
It is no spoiler to reveal, since we learn this in the second scene, that the piece is essentially a ghost story. The hero, a successful stockbroker, returns to the house where, on Christmas Eve in 1944, he, his wife and their guests were killed by a flying bomb. 
Seven years later the reluctant revenant takes some persuading that he is a ghost and much of the action consists of his embattled encounters with the forces of the law, the church and the state. There are even hints that the brusque hero enjoys what you might call a phantom affair with an empathetic lady librarian.
In the lead role of self-made man John Greenwood, Michael Praed deals with the incredible situation stylishly and is full of charisma. Praed delivers the play’s thoughtful moments well, including the burgeoning romance with a librarian. Greenwood seems oddly tranquil with his predicament. The reckoning this ghost needs to settle is with his wife, but Sherriff adds atonement – as a kind of fable – too late.
Alex Marker comes up with a stunning set that does a couple of lightning conversions, and Aden Gillett has a corporeal solidity that contrasts nicely with the hero’s spectral status. In particular, he brings out the aggressively self-made qualities of a man who, even in the afterlife, gets more fun out of the FT’s stocks and shares than Homer or Dickens.
The majority of the play deals humorously with the implications of Greenwood’s spectral status. Firstly, with the town councillor, played by a delightfully outraged Robert Benfield, who hopes to solve housing problems by tearing down the property he now finds haunted. Then with a nice gentleman from the Home Office, managed in appropriate style by Philip York, hoping this inconvenient ectoplasm will emigrate. The local vicar, Benjamin Whitrow, truly stealing his scene, trumps both with a cracker of a performance.
Ridicule of the establishment in The White Carnation is effective, but gentle. The whole affair is gloriously steeped in nostalgia, a fact that director Knight Mantell and his cast seem cleverly aware of.
After 60 years in hibernation, this is a revived success. In the words of stockbroker Greenword himself, “I’ve made a success of everything I’ve ever done, and I’m darn well going to make a success of being a ghost.”
From 4th – 22 February 2014
