Belvoir St Theatre’s content warning for A Room with a View reads more like a promise: ‘Full nudity – and we do mean full!’ Fans of the 1985 Merchant Ivory film will know the scene in question.
That wink sets the tone for Grace Chapple’s new adaptation, directed by Hannah Goodwin. It’s a cheekier, more contemporary take on EM Forster’s 1908 novel than the film, one that embraces and enhances the tale’s humour and mischief.
Lucy Honeychurch (Nathalie Morris) is a young Englishwoman holidaying in Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte (Hayley McElhinney). Her staid life in Surrey quickly becomes a distant memory as she’s immersed in the voluptuous beauty and passions of the Tuscan city – and the attentions of George Emerson (Luke Wiltshire).
Back in England and engaged to Cecil Vyse (Charles Wu), Lucy starts to question the life that’s been mapped out for her.
A Room with a View theatre review – quick links
A dip in the pond
About that scene. George, Lucy’s brother Freddy (Tomáš Kantor) and the clergyman Mr Beebe (Tom Conroy) go skinny-dipping in a local pond, and this production amps it up. It’s an extended sequence and, as promised, nothing is left to the imagination.
It’s more than a stunt. When Lucy and her mother (Kate Atkinson) stumble upon the bathers, the ensuing shock makes for effective satire of Edwardian prudery and repression.
The scene shows off Amelia Lever-Davidson’s exquisite lighting too. When the men are underwater, the muted, mottled blues make us feel as though we’re in the pond with them. Elsewhere, sunshine streaming through windows, a thunderstorm and a piazza at night are all persuasively conveyed.
The music is similarly gorgeous. Composer Grace Ferguson and sound designer Madeleine Picard have created a lush, evocative soundscape that befits both the era and the twin settings of Tuscany and the English countryside.
Zoë Atkinson’s set is basic, but her costumes are well constructed and effective and, with lighting and sound this good, the plainness hardly matters.
A room of their own
The acting is strong across the board. Wiltshire is a standout, capturing George’s emotional honesty and masculine taciturnity. So is Patrick Williams as George’s father, Mr Emerson, the unconventional working-class philosopher who is in many ways the play’s moral heartbeat. Williams gives him a dignified cadence that is exactly right.
Kantor and Wu mine their roles for comedy, while Conroy paints a textured portrait of the sexually repressed clergyman.
But this play belongs to its women. Forster’s story is about a young woman deciding what kind of woman to become, and the older women around Lucy are the options on offer.
McElhinney’s Charlotte is the cautionary tale: the woman Lucy will become if she keeps choosing propriety over feeling. McElhinney finds both the comedy and the sadness in her without overplaying either, and the result is poignant.
Kate Atkinson doubles as Miss Lavish, the novelist who champions adventure in Florence, and Mrs Honeychurch, the mother waiting at home in Surrey. She makes the two quite distinct, though anyone who saw her in the television prison drama Wentworth will know these roles ask less of her than she has to give.
At the centre is Morris, who is good at everything the role demands. If she isn’t quite convincing in the very earliest scenes, she hits her stride when Lucy witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza and never loses it. When Lucy’s change of heart comes, we believe it.
Why now?
At two hours and 50 minutes, including interval, the production is a bit too long, and Surrey is where it sags. A good editor could lose 20 minutes without anyone missing them.
ArtsHub: Australian theatre to look forward to in 2027
A question also nagged on the way out: why this story, and why now?
Chapple’s program note offers an answer of sorts. She loved the novel so much, she writes, that on finishing it she turned straight back to page one. Is the result fan fiction? Maybe, she says. She’s a big fan.
It’s an honest answer, and it accounts for both the production’s pleasures and its length. Fans are rarely ruthless editors.
Still, this is an accomplished, entertaining night at the theatre. Whether Sydney needs A Room with a View in 2026 is debatable. Whether it will enjoy it is not.
