Lettice and Lovage

There’s a thin layer of the dust of Tudor England that sits on top of the Court Theatre’s Lettice and Lovage, Peter Shaffer’s Britwit comedy about “living history” house tour guide Lettice (Hodges), who gets the boot for embellishing history. Fortunately, leading ladies Hodges and Reiter, as the stuffy bureaucrat in charge of firing Lettice but who ultimately finds herself sucked into a world of vivid historical re-creations, are able to shake it off for most of the play’s three hours, making the evening worthwhile. But the thing about shaking off dust is that it hangs in the air, reminding us of livelier times.

Originally a vehicle for inscrutable Dame Maggie Smith, Lettice is intended as a finely inscribed love letter to history connoisseurs who love it for its inherent drama, and get lost in its details. Without a distracting star, though, it becomes clear that Shaffer has (over)written little more than an academic female Odd Couple.

Yet Hodges’s original creation of a haunted drama queen lingers (her willowy, spectral turn looks and sounds uncannily like the ghost of Court regular Barbara Robertson), and Reiter makes believable (and even lovable) the stock type of the square who finds her inner ham. Still, Conroy’s by-the-book direction makes us wish she were as interested in pumping blood into a less-than-fascinating story as her main character is.—Christopher Piatt