WIFE TO JAMES WHELAN Jermyn St Theatre

AMBITION, LOVE AND CHOICES IN AN OLDER IRELAND Jonathan Bank’s Mint Theater company lately gave us an arresting revival of Miles Malleson’s Yours Unfaithfully in this theatre, and here he is reinvigorating another 1930s play, this time by the near-forgotten Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, From the title I vaguely expected a familiar story of wifely submission or rebellion, with the local crone andMother Church giving trouble on the sidelines. Actually Deevy’s story is more interesting than that, sparkingly youthful, and until the final moment (no spoilers) Fiach Kunz’s dashing James Whelan has as yet married nobody. He’s made a grand life for himself, though: we meet him first by report, in a short first-act scene where amiable Tom (Patrick McBrearty) and Bill McGafferty (Darragh Feehely) are joshing with pretty Nan Bowers (Cliona Flynn). We get a sense of the town and its rumours: Bill is off to a new job, the others impressed that Whelan got the Dublin job several of them had been in…