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The Arts Intel Report

The Forsyte Saga

Fiona Hampton as Irene and Joseph Millson as Soames in Part One of The Forsyte Saga.

Oct 11 – Dec 7, 2024
Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park, London N4 3JP, United Kingdom

Spanning multiple novels and four decades, beginning in the late 1800s, John Galsworthy’s family epic is filled with complex characters and endless drama. Lin Coghlan and Shaun McKenna have adapted it into a two-part play, praised by the Times as, “sumptuous, panoramic, intense, amusing: vividly of its time yet arrestingly modern in its understanding of the games we play.” At the story’s core is a traumatic event that binds two central characters, Irene and Fleur. Part One focuses on Irene’s unhappy marriage to Soames Forsyte, whose jealousy leads to marital rape. In Part Two, when Fleur, Soames’s daughter from a second marriage, falls for Irene’s son from her second marriage, old wounds resurface. “A witty and highly enjoyable duo of plays that create the stage equivalent of a box-set binge,” writes the Financial Times critic Sarah Hemming, “while making serious points about power, values, and sexual politics across a period of intense social change.” —Jeanne Malle