Class envy notwithstanding, getting beyond one’s station is only one of a highly charged evening’s intriguing concerns at heart, “The Servant” chronicles the subtle tensions of a society surrendering to its own straitjacket, which is to say a highly codified (and not altogether bygone) Britain where sexual matters speak their own covert language.
And though Tony gets various warnings - not least from girlfriend Sally (Emma Amos, her coiffeur as precise as her accent is posh) - that Barrett may be up to no good, Tony allows himself to slide toward playing the suppliant vis-a-vis a manservant of highly apparent malignity. “I like to make you comfortable, sir,” says Barrett, while proudly insulating his master from the cold, drab world outside.īefore you can say “by Jeeves,” employer and employee are squabbling like a long-married couple come to blows over soup spoons. All fastidious efficiency (at least at the start), Barrett finds himself on the payroll of Tony (Jack Davenport, following in James Fox’s screen shoes), who is himself the sort of well-spoken Chelsea layabout that contemporary English drama - with its emphasis on working-class “street cred” - has all but abandoned. So is an actor with the insinuating elan of Michael Feast, inheriting Dirk Bogarde’s film role as Barrett, the titular servant.
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