Brits Off Broadway: Wolves at the Window

The most successful section in the Brits Off Broadway import Wolves at the Window takes its time to arrive. After a long stream of delicately wicked Edwardian vignettes, the company gets around to its point. On a train (represented poor-theater-style by chairs and a trunk), a man tells two children a grisly story in which a virtuous little girl—her “goodness medals” clinking—comes to a bloody end. “Well, at least I kept them quiet for ten minutes,” he observes as he rustles back into his newspaper. Toby Davies ends his evening of adapted Saki tales with the same line—and if Davies is unambitious, at least he is direct. Wolves at the Window is what the publishing industry would call a cozy, a bedtime story for nostalgic grown-ups. If you are in an indulgent mood, it might even keep you quiet for the full two hours.

Saki (the pen name of Hector Munro) wrote arch turn-of-the-century morsels that prepared the British palate for the spooky and the snide—listening to Saki’s stories, you’ll hear the echoes of everything from Monty Python to Lemony Snicket. Thomas Hescott keeps his quartet of able actors from any postmodern wackiness, though; they remain admirably dry while acting out stories about a talking cat who knows too much, a bluestocking tiger-hunter with dodgy methods, a cereal promotion that exploits the masochism of the middle class and a dozen other bits of mild skulduggery. There is also an extraordinarily bizarre bit about the ongoing English worship of Pan. Although the latter packs a moderate chuckle, it also reminds us of all the wildness and unbridled, Dionysiac splendor this production so deliberately lacks.—Helen Shaw

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