In 1967 the seminal film of The Graduate came out and in the same year, the film of Barefoot in the Park starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, as the newly weds in New York who are moving in together for the first time.  The wonderful songs of Simon and Garfunkel remind us of the period and still have resonance.  Neil Simon’s play had run on Broadway from 1963 and his play is a gentle and charming comedy with 1960s values before 1968 Flower Power and student revolution. 

You are not seeing here a play manipulated to reflect woke principles and you may feel a lot has changed in the last 50 years and not necessarily for the better.  Corie (Hannah Pauley) seems to be a stay at home wife while Paul (Jonny Labey) is starting a career as a attorney in a New York legal hothouse.  Their first six days were spent in an hotel and Corie is left to move in the brownstone apartment while Paul goes to work. 

Her first visitor is the telephone engineer Harry Pepper (Oliver Stanley).  The furniture hasn’t yet arrived so the phone needs an extra long lead. Set designer Michael Holt has excelled with the apartment set, a brilliant reconstruction of the film with its huge skylight with a broken pane and bizarrely ceiling height radiator which of course doesn’t work and New York is expecting snow storms.  Holt’s attention to detail is impressive: Gordon’s Gin with the American label and a yellow legal notepad in Foolscap size, no A4’s in New York!