The Forsyte Saga Review - The Swan Theatre

★★★★☆

At The Swan Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company has taken on a daunting task: staging John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga in two expansive parts. This is not light evening entertainment, nor does it pretend to be. With a deliberately stripped-back aesthetic, this production asks for patience, attention, and emotional investment. In return, it offers something quietly engrossing: a rich portrait of family, class, and scandal. But does this adaptation justify its 5-hour demand on the audience’s attention?

Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Fleur Forsyte and Joseph Millson as Soames Forsyte. Photo credit: Cam Harle

Part 1 introduces us to the Forsyte family at the height of their prosperity in Victorian England. Property, reputation, and respectability are the guiding principles, embodied most clearly in Soames Forsyte, a man who views marriage as something that can be owned. His marriage to the beautiful but emotionally distant Irene sets conflict into motion, particularly when Irene forms a connection with the idealistic architect Philip Bosinney. Around this love triangle swirls a host of interveining relatives, including the spirited June Forsyte, Bosinney’s fiancée, who often clashes with the rigid values of her elders. Part 1 charts a family outwardly stable but cracking, when personal desire begins to strain against the rules, and where the cost of maintaining appearances grows ever higher.

Part 2 shifts forward in time, examining the consequences of those earlier dramatics. The Forsyte world has changed: fortunes waver, social codes loosen, and a younger generation questions the values and family feuds they have inherited. Fleur Forsyte, Soames’s daughter, becomes a central figure, navigating identity and romances in a society that no longer quite resembles the one her parents knew. Behaviours become inherited through generations, and old wounds resurface in new forms. Where Part 1 is about possession and repression, Part 2 feels more like a true love story of regret, longing, and the uneasy possibility of change. It is less explosive, but more like a sad poem, asking what survives when the certainties of the past finally die.

What becomes clear across both halves is just how rich Galsworthy’s writing is, and how carefully this production treats it. The text is dense with lyrical description and psychological insight, and the cast delivers it with a smoothness that makes even long passages feel melodic rather than heavy. There is a confidence in letting the language do the work, trusting the audience to follow the rhythms and absorb the detail. The emotions emerge gradually, but they are deeply felt, and the absence of clear heroes or villains makes the drama far more compelling. These are flawed people making understandable yet painful choices, and that moral ambiguity is one of the production’s great strengths.

Visually, the production is strikingly understated. With just four chairs and a series of curtains, the stage remains largely bare, but Alex Musgrave’s lighting design does extraordinary work in transforming the space. Light becomes architecture, geography, and emotion all at once. A subtle shift can suggest a locked room, a landscape panorama, or the imagined blueprint of a future home. At other moments, the lighting sharpens into something stark and unforgiving, mirroring the emotional chill between characters. It is an elegant, intelligent design that never draws attention to itself, yet constantly shapes how we read the action.

The company of The Forsyte Saga Part 1. Photo Credit: Cam Harle

Anna Yates’s costume design further anchors the production in time, clearly representing both the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The costumes evoke high society without ostentation. These visual cues are invaluable, given the doubling of roles throughout the cast, helping the audience orient quickly as actors shift identities.

At the centre of the saga stands Joseph Millson’s Soames Forsyte, and his performance is quietly revelatory. Millson resists any temptation to turn Soames into a straightforward antagonist. Instead, he plays him as a man constantly at war with himself, visibly suppressing emotion in favour of respectability. There are moments where you can almost see the internal struggle play out physically, as Soames reins himself in for fear of breaking the Forsyte code. It is a nuanced, controlled performance that makes Soames both frustrating and strangely sympathetic. Despite his actions, particularly in Part 1, you find yourself rooting for him, or at least hoping he might find some form of redemption.

Fiona Hampton’s Irene Forsyte provides a compelling counterpoint. Calm, composed, and intensely watchable, Hampton becomes an emotional anchor for the audience. Her transformation from a young, constrained Irene in Part 1 to an older, more fragile presence in Part 2 is achieved not through costume or make-up, but through subtle shifts in posture, energy, and voice. It is an intelligent piece of acting that enhances the sense of time passing and underscores Irene’s enduring significance to the narrative.

Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Fleur Forsyte, Andy Rush as Jon Forsyte and Florence Roberts as Anne Forsyte. Photo Credit: Cam Harle

Florence Roberts proves astonishingly versatile, taking on the roles of June, Annette, and Anne Forsyte with remarkable clarity. Each character is distinct in voice, physicality, and temperament, and Roberts’s natural comic timing brings warmth and immediacy to the stage. Her June in Part 1 is particularly delightful: spirited, earnest, and heartbreakingly sincere. She wins the audience over instantly, providing moments of humour without ever undermining the emotional stakes.

As Fleur Forsyte, Flora Spencer-Longhurst performs an impressively complex balancing act. Acting as both narrator and character, she guides us through the story with wit, intelligence, and emotional sensitivity. Her ability to step in and out of the action keeps the sprawling narrative coherent, and her handling of the production’s emotional peaks and troughs is assured. Even when certain moments don’t land as powerfully as they might, Spencer-Longhurst’s command of the stage keeps the audience engaged and invested.

Jamie Wilkes is a particular highlight in Part 2, with his portrayal of Michael Mont. Where his presence in Part 1 may not immediately stand out, his work in the second half is utterly charming. His Michael is playful, open-hearted, and deeply devoted, and Wilkes’s performance brings a welcome sense of joy and optimism to the later stages of the saga. It is the kind of performance that makes your heart lift, providing emotional contrast to the production’s more sombre themes.

Fiona Hampton as Irene Forsyte, Andy Rush as Philip Bosinney and the company. Photo Credit: Cam Harle.

Andy Rush makes a strong impression in Part 1 as Philip Bosinney, playing him as an idealistic outsider whose presence disrupts the Forsyte equilibrium. This performance is skilfully judged and gives Bosinney real narrative weight as the catalyst for much of the drama. However, Rush’s later roles as Jon Forsyte and Mr Polteed are less successful. The characterisation feels repetitive and, in the case of Polteed, tonally at odds with the rest of the production.

Not every element lands perfectly. Michael Lumsden’s dual casting as Swithin and Jolyon Forsyte proves slightly problematic. Whilst performed incredibly well, the minimal differentiation in costume or physicality means the two characters blur into one another, making Swithin, in particular, feel narratively insignificant. While this doesn’t derail the plot, it does lessen the impact of those scenes.

The sound design, too, is something of a mixed blessing. While atmospheric effects and surround sound help establish the setting, they often feel detached from the action. The sound of peacocks in Part 1 is particularly distracting, and in Part 2, the train station scene is overwhelmed by ambience that competes with rather than supports the onstage drama. As an emotional driver, the sound design occasionally enhances the storytelling but, at times, actively pulls attention away from it.

Taken as a whole, however, The Forsyte Saga at The Swan Theatre is an impressive, thoughtful piece of theatre; its ambition, intelligence, and humanity are undeniable. This is a production that rewards commitment, offering a detailed, compassionate exploration of people shaped, and sometimes trapped, by their time. For those willing to spend an evening (or two) in the company of the Forsytes, there is much to admire, much to reflect on, and plenty to discuss on the drive home. If theatre can still offer us a mirror to our own shifting values and contradictions, then isn’t this precisely the kind of story worth sitting with?