Dear Octopus review: Dodie Smith’s slow burning pre-war family saga will suck you in

Why is the National Theatre staging this frightfully old fashioned play from the 1930s? A superb performance from Lindsay Duncan and a production tinged with foreboding are reason enough

Lindsay Duncan as gentle tyrant Dora in ‘Dear Octopus’ (Marc Brenner)

An awfully big house, a terribly large family with frightfully clipped accents. What are we doing here? This gauzy, romantic interwar play, with speeches about family and God and sweet little fireside romances, seems so ridiculously old-fashioned now. Dodie Smith, writer of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, may have been popular back in the day, with a string of theatre successes throughout the Thirties, but what’s her 1938 work Dear Octopus doing on the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage in 2024?

We’ve got the golden wedding anniversary of Dora (Lindsay Duncan) and Charles (Malcolm Sinclair), who have gathered their family, spread over several generations, under the roof of their big ancestral home to celebrate. There are minor grievances and darling romances, a couple of little secrets, but nothing too profane. It’s obviously a deft bit of writing by Smith, spinning all these plates, but nothing much actually happens in the play, and for a while you do wonder what it’s all for.

At the centre of the many-limbed octopus is Lindsay Duncan’s Dora, a gentle tyrant, constantly giving everyone “little jobs” to do: “Nicholas, dear, just check on the fire. Cynthia, dear, just turn these napkins into water lilies.” It’s a superb performance from Duncan, who holds onto both possibilities simultaneously that her Dora knows exactly how manipulative she’s being and that it’s all the innocent result of her innate guilelessness. She’s commanding but soft, regal but deeply loving.