Home at Seven review – a superbly acted time-slip mystery

Tabard theatre, London
A man returns home having been reported missing for 24 hours in this welcome revival of RC Sherriff’s postwar hit

Our perceptions of the first world war are greatly shaped by RC Sherriff. His 1928 trench tragedy Journey’s End, a drama for doomed youth, became a school play staple and has been filmed or televised, with degrees of looseness, six times, as well as explicitly being a model for Blackadder Goes Forth.

As can happen to authors of a classic, Sherriff suffered from his other output being overlooked, but the punchy above-pub Tabard theatre in west London has revived Home at Seven, a now forgotten 1950 success. In a curious parallel to the Blackadder link, Home at Seven’s main cultural prominence has been in Dad’s Army studies, as the play in which the Captain Mainwaring actor Arthur Lowe was touring the UK when he died in 1982.