"The Forsyte Saga" Parts One and Two. The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The words ‘Forsyte’ and ‘Saga’ have powerful connotations: the first with the late Bruce Forsyth, avuncular catch-phrase king of Saturday evening TV; the second with the kinds of interminable Norse epics beloved of JRR Tolkien; or, more recently, package holidays for the elderly. In short, this play’s title, though resonant, is scarcely enticing. Not having seen any of the TV incarnations of John Galsworthy’s nine-novel chronicle, I came to the RSC’s ambitious, two-part production anticipating some kind of decades-spanning period piece peopled by interchangeable, stiff-collared chaps with moustaches, and endless ladies in crinolines. Buttock- and brain-fatigue were due to set in at around the four-hour mark.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Never mind Brucie: these Forsytes are playing their own traumatic intergeneration game. It’s spellbinding, tragic, redolent of an entire age, and yet at the same time deeply personal. The word that comes to mind is hamartia. Every GCSE English student knows it. It means the flaw in a dramatic hero that leads to their downfall. But in The Forsyte Saga the hamartia isn’t confined to one character. It belongs to a whole family; a dynasty; and, by implication, an entire society. The Forsyte family fault is that they venerate possessions above all, and as a result they lose their souls. This is the death of England, played out in country house lawns and Belgrave Square salons. No one was saved.

This production confounds expectations at every turn, most immediately in Anna Yates’s remarkable set design. By rights, this sort of play should be supplied with the most conventional of settings: a drawing-room, a drinks table, lawns glimpsed through the French windows. But the stage of the Swan is devoid of doilies. Instead it is carpeted in what Macbeth would call One Red: a cocoon-like expanse of rich velour backed by swathes of opulent drapes, all in the same colour. It places the characters in a world of luxury and privilege like the House of Lords. But at the same time, the unbroken crimson suggests the binding blood of family hierarchies, and the inescapability of it even hints at the fires of hell. The Forsytes are trapped in a lavish inferno of their own creation.

The house at the centre of the story, the Arts and Crafts mansion Robin Hill, is no more than a square of light on the floor and, occasionally, the bricks of the Swan Theatre’s own back wall. The funeral of Queen Victoria is conjured up by those red drapes slowly lowering to the ground. And the horrific turning point of the entire saga, a marital rape committed by the emotionally repressed Soames Forsyte on his defenceless wife Irene, takes place behind a locked door denoted by no more than a giant shadow.

And yet all the locations feel fully realised, from a dusty warehouse crawling with rats to a summer sunrise seen from a leafy coppice. Yates’s set dovetails with Alex Musgrave’s lighting and Max Pappenheim’s sound to create a convincing world which, rather than being fettered by traditional trinkets, is free to mould around the characters’ lives. It completely rejects realism. But it’s liberated and symbolic, and it imbues the entire production with freshness and originality. Perhaps the most wondrous moment comes in Part Two, when Michael Mont (Jamie Wilkes displaying mime-powers of almost Marceau-esque proportions) conveys Fleur Forsyte (Flora Spencer-Longhurst, a revelation after warming up for this role as one of the Mitford sisters in The Party Girls) across a river in a punt. There’s no river, no punt, and no pole: just a couple of chairs and a tennis racquet. But the illusion is so complete that the audience bursts into applause as they reach the bank.

Turning Galsworthy’s magnum opus into a five-hour play meant that adaptors Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan had to be extremely selective. Wisely, they – along with director Josh Roche – have made this story revolve around two women, Irene and Fleur Forsyte. Irene, played with dignity and occasional bursts of elemental rage by Fiona Hampton, is trapped in a loveless marriage with Soames Forsyte (Joseph Millson), a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He collects art not for its beauty but its investment potential. Irene falls in love with architect Philip Bosinney (Andy Rush), setting in train a sequence of tragic events that echo through the generations. Fleur is Soames’ daughter from another marriage, and, decades later, she falls for her cousin Jon (also played by Andy Rush), thus inadvertently raking up the scandals of the past.

It is indeed an epic spanning forty years. But, like all the best epics (Lawrence of Arabia, I’m looking at you) this one is focussed on moments of personal crisis rather than sweeping national events. It’s all furtive meetings, whispered confessions, sudden violence. You feel like you’re in there with them. That’s why it’s so emotionally involving. The Boer War, The Great War, the General Strike are no more than backdrops. What we see are real people caring about what real people always care about: love and money.

The entire show is narrated by Fleur, as she strolls unseen amongst her ancestors, commenting, quipping and cajoling as she goes. Even when she becomes a character in the story herself, she continues to narrate, as if the Fall of the House of Forsyte were not just a family history, but her own personal confession. Spencer-Longhurst is the perfect storyteller: confidante, guide and chorus. She knows how it starts and she knows how it ends – in her case, it might be called the hindsight saga. But even Fleur, the Bright Young Thing of the 1920s, falls prey to the Forsyte urge to possess, and it is her undoing.

This production wears its theatrical ingenuity lightly. Scenes of new actors taking on roles from each other as the characters age, or sudden time-jumps connecting parallel events from the 1880s to the 1920s, are satisfyingly creative without being ostentatiously experimental. It’s all been done before. Under Roche’s sure-handed direction, The Forsyte Saga doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does drive a very smooth Rolls-Royce.

And writers McKenna and Coghlan are only too aware of the literary continuum in which this story sits. Ibsen lurks in the background, with women struggling to break the bonds of patriarchal dominion. Chekhov is present too, as the fading upper classes fritter their time away in country retreats. Wuthering Heights gets a couple of mentions, and its theme of one generation paying for the sins of the previous is only too evident. But towering above them all is Aeschylus, pointing the inevitable finger of disaster at humanity, no matter how hard it tries to escape. This is a tragedy of inheritance, fate, and moral contamination – not just Edwardian manners.

Despite being the villain of the piece, the one character who finds redemption is Soames. Joseph Millson is pitch-perfect as the buttoned-up bastion of Victorian values. Constantly working his lips as if sucking the last drop of juice out of a particularly bitter prune, he moves convincingly from rapist to penitent, and even if not forgiven, he is mourned.

This is a play about love and passion thwarted by self-interest and convention. Its vast scope never undermines its personal touch, and it has moments of piercing beauty, like Young Jolyon’s melancholic observation, ‘The peacocks sound like lost souls shut out of heaven’ or his tender offer to Irene: ‘Let me be your perching place, never your cage.’ We head out into wintry Stratford warmed with these moments of humanity, but still carrying the Forsyte curse that seems tattooed to their family tree: ‘We’re Forsytes. We don’t talk about our feelings; we just let them fester in the dark.’ I left feeling that Bruce Forsyth might have been thinking about this family after all when he sang the theme tune to The Generation Game: ‘Life is the name of the game, and I want to play the game with you.’