ONE of only two plays written by former Communist Party member and Nobel prizewinner Doris Lessing, Each His Own Wilderness is set in 1958, just two years after John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger transformed the post-war theatrical landscape and ushered in the era of the “angry young man.”

Directed by Paul Miller, it’s the first major production of the play since its debut at London’s Royal Court theatre that same year.

In it Tony (Joel MacCormack) returns from National Service restless and dissatisfied to find his mother still the political activist she’s been since her youth.

“Bored of the noble gestures,” he rejects her political activism — an attitude his parent Myra (Clare Holman) finds incomprehensible. Where is his anger, she wonders.

She and her friend Milly (Susannah Harker) lead a Bohemian lifestyle, leading them to an erotic entanglement with the younger generation, both sleeping with each other’s sons. That may fail to convince but must have appeared outrageous behaviour in the 1950s. Nor is the commitment of the two older women to campaigning against the hydrogen bomb fully convincing, appearing to be more a middle-class hobby than a genuine emotional and intellectual passion.

While the play interweaves the personal with the political, it is very much a generational clash with the usual polarisation turned on its head. Here the young generation, represented by Tony and the innocent nurse Rita (Rosie Holden), is conservatively apolitical and longing only for cosy “petit bourgeois” stability, while the older generation is still battling for peace and social justice.

Though Lessing writes good dialogue, with some clever one-liners and moments of raw humour, on the political level she remains surprisingly shallow. “These people talk about politics with all the passionate intensity other people reserve for sex,” Tony says at one point but there is too little of this political intercourse in the play. He cynically rejects his mother’s “gesture politics” as well as her dreams of him becoming an architect, opting instead to learn the electrician’s trade.

The older generation had its causes culminating in support for the republican cause in the Spanish civil war. But in the post-war era, disappointment in the Labour government’s reluctance to bring in socialism, there is, Tony says bitterly, “no longer the luxury of getting killed for something you believe in.”

Though a polished production with excellent acting in this intimate space that suggestively captures the claustrophobia where each is denied “his own wilderness,” one can’t help feeling that Lessing here is already reflecting the political cynicism that would so mark her mature years as a writer.

Runs until May 16, box office: orangetreetheatre.co.uk

Review by John Green