The Go-Between

Review by Clare Phillips.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel was as much as I knew of this work, having not read it or seen any previous stage or screen adaptation. We can’t always watch a production and not know how it ends, but I really enjoyed this performance and am glad it was my first introduction to the story.

When young Leo Colston spends the summer of 1900 in rural Norfolk, he becomes the unwitting messenger between two forbidden lovers. What begins as an innocent errand soon unravels into a dangerous web of love, loss and betrayal in a summer that is destined to end in tragedy.

The play begins with Leo – now in his sixties – reading the diary he kept at the time and reflecting on that summer.

The theme of social class is central to The Go-Between. Leo who is from a middle-class family is invited to spend the summer holidays – which were in the throes of a heatwave – with the wealthy family of his school-friend Marcus Maudsley. Mrs Maudsley intends Marcus’s older sister Marian to marry local aristocrat Hugh, Viscount Trimingham. However – in a plot twist not dissimilar to D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – Marian is having a passionate clandestine relationship with Ted, a local tenant farmer, and Leo, who has a crush on Marian, needs little persuading at first to take messages between the two about what he believes to be their ‘business arrangements’.

Howard Saddler is magnificent playing both the 65-year-old Leo and his 13-year-old self. With no elaborate costume changes between the two characters, it’s his body language and facial expressions that allow the audience to immediately identify which Leo it is in the scene, before a word of the script is uttered.

All the cast are excellent but special mention must also go to Jake Ashton-Nelson who plays Trimingham. The Viscount has recently returned from the Boer War, with a facial injury that has left him disfigured. Edwardian society of course did not speak of war time traumas – Leo is expressly forbidden by Marcus to mention Trimingham’s injury – but his PTSD is obvious enough to the audience.

It’s clear that the events of that summer have had a lasting effect on the older Leo as he looks back too. He has shut down his own emotions and found it difficult to form relationships. One is left asking questions about what might have been during Leo’s adult life otherwise. As well as the aforementioned parallels between ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and the original story, I also wondered whether another early 20th Century classic, E. M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’, might have been a source of inspiration if not for the book – although Forster and Hartley would have mixed in the same literary circles and both been working on these titles in the early 1950s – then perhaps for this production.

Possibly the most surprising thing about this, given that it’s an Eastern Angles production, was that I got less of a sense of place than I expected. There are Norfolk accents and trips to Norwich are mentioned, but the location seems less important to the story somehow. That’s not a criticism as the performance was really all about the inhabitants of Brandham Hall and its neighbours, rather than specifically Norfolk.

There are still opportunities to see this on tour and it’s well worth doing so.

My tickets were complimentary in return for honestly reviewing this production and I thank Eastern Angles, The New Wolsey Theatre and Suffolk on Stage for the opportunity to do so.

A very enjoyable and thought-provoking production.

The Go-Between was at New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich.

Also showing at Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds on 11 September 2026. Click HERE for details.

Also showing at The Quay Theatre, Sudbury on 18 September 2026. Click HERE for details.

9 to 5 - The Musical

Suffolk on Stage