As a playwright, Julian Mitchell is part of a vanishing breed: the fastidious craftsman who knows how to explore ideas while generating suspense. And I certainly enjoyed Mitchell's new play for displaying his familiar virtues – seen at their best in Another Country – of irony, wit and intelligence. Yet I also feel that Mitchell's love of neatness resolves the complex issues he raises too swiftly, as if a landscape gardener had been called in to tidy up a domestic jungle. We start, as so often, with a family reunion. William, the widowed, stroke-afflicted head of an upmarket travel agency, summons his children to the Welsh borders home he shares with his African-born carer, Solomon. Somewhat tetchily, William greets the offspring who have all lived off the firm's profits: the snobby Jane, the financially feckless Tom and the earnestly ecological Hugo. The only one for whom William seems to have much time is the youngest, Jane, who gets engaged, to quote an Alan Bennett line, rather in the manner of a public lavatory: very often and for very short periods. But, at the end of the first act, William pulls a surprise that had the audience gasping with delight.

It is clear that the play is, in part, a modern-day Lear. It is about an ageing entrepreneur divvying up his kingdom and, in the process, generating a series of internal conflicts. Much the best involves Hugo, who puts the environmental case more clearly than anyone I've yet encountered on stage: he denounces members of the family travel firm as "climate change criminals" and argues that individual actions, as recycling proves, can make a difference. But this is also a play about shifting sexual attitudes, and enough skeletons come tumbling out of William's closet to make a ghouls' banquet. While I've no problems with that, the need to resolve the issues raised by William's relaxed attitude to parenting means that plot finally takes precedence over ideas.

Matthew Lloyd's production is, however, immensely watchable, Ruari Murchison's design offers a seductive vision of the Welsh hills and Gerard Murphy is in fine form as the domineering patriarch. Ben Onwukwe as his nurse exudes a dignified patience, and there is good support from Tom Berish as the environmental idealist and from Anna O'Grady, who plays Cordelia to William's Lear while offering a very funny sketch of a bad-taste tour of Britain. Even if the play gallops to an over-neat conclusion, it provides a lot of pungent laughter on the way.

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What’s On Stage: Anne Morley-Priestman

It’s a very clever play, and a witty one as well. But, at the end of it all, Julian Mitchell’s new play Family Business lacks one vital ingredient. It has no heart. The succession of one-liners flows copiously. There are moments when it’s almost like an Oscar Wilde comedy transformed for the 21st century, with just a dash of Bernard Shaw polemics thrown in for good measure. We listen intently, but from the outside only. Matthew Lloyd’s production is as effortlessly smooth as Mitchell’s writing and there’s a good set by Ruari Murchison which gives us the ground-floor of a barn conversion dominating (or perhaps hemmed in by) the neighbouring hills and valleys.

An excellent central performance comes from Gerard Murphy as William, a widower with a multi-million pound travel company recovering from a heart attack, who also has four grown-up children and a carer (apparently a left-over from his wife’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease). Ben Onwukwe matches him as Solomon, the softly-spoken, steel-cored survivor. Then there are the four siblings. Jane has a financier husband (suffering from the recession), twin daughters (one with an expensive pony habit, the other heading for an equally expensive boarding-school) and an unbecoming greed as well as equally unpleasant prejudices. Her brother Tom is trying to “go it alone” but his Chinese business-partner has disappeared off the edge of an unfinished motorway and the funds to finish a luxury holiday complex on a coral-reef atoll have been crushed with him. What's more, his Polynesian girl friend has recently given birth to their son. Hugo is a born-again ecological warrior, at odds with his family in particular and the climate change-ignoring western world in general. And younger sister Kate? Kate is the dark horse in this stable, and she’s given real character by Anna O’Grady in a very well-paced portrayal. You can also believe in Chris Kelham’s Tom and – in so far as his attitudinising allows – in Tom Berish’s Hugo. Partly because not all her words were as clear as they might have been, Tessa Churchard’s Jane is the least satisfactory person on stage. But I suspect that, just as we in the audience don’t like Jane very much, neither does the author.

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Watford Observer

Julian Mitchell’s play Family Business had its world premiere at Watford Palace Theatre on Tuesday last.The production revolves around an absurdly unconventional family and their relationships with one another. The audience seemed to enjoy the humorous but improbable plot, which hinges around some show stopping personal revelations at a family gathering. Family Business follows an implausible story line, which makes it harder for the characters in it to appear credible and play out the scenes they have been given and harder for us as an audience to believe in what we are watching. I looked hard for hidden metaphors that would link themes to modern life past or present but if they were there, I confess, I missed them.The cast work well together and deliver the piece in an accomplished and entertaining way. Gerard Murphy is very likeable as William and Ben Onwukwe plays a very tricky part with a lot of class. Tom Berish as Hugo, exercises some great comedy timing and delivers some priceless lines. His environmental, guilt ridden character is also very convincing. Chris Kelham as Tom and Tessa Churchard as Jane, play the outraged, self-centred brother and sister to a tee but for me though, Anna O’Grady wins the honours, with her very powerful performance as Kate. Ruari Murchison has provided a striking set, which the actors appear to inhabit with ease and provides them with some innovative entrances and exits, which work very well. Matthew Lloyd has directed a complex play, with a fairly questionable plot and managed to provide a very talented bunch of actors with the direction necessary to manage all the difficult twists and turns that are thrown up during the performance. Well done to the cast, who I feel made the best of an interesting and amusing but nevertheless reluctant narrative.

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The Public Reviews: Mary Tapper at the Oxford Playhouse

Julian Mitchell is a playwright with a lot of issues to air – conservation of wild animals, population growth, the carbon footprint of tourism, sustainable energy, water as a scarce resource and these are just those on the eco front! We also have private schools, women’s lib, sexual freedom and race mixed in for good measure plus a couple of others that can’t be alluded to in this review without ruining the surprises! Unfortunately the characters he uses to illuminate these issues are almost universally unpleasant and the play suffers as we invest so little in caring about them.

William, played by Gerald Murphy, is the head of a tourism business in which three of his four children work. His wife has died a couple of years before and there is a trust fund, left by her, containing 49% of the business for the children. As the business is worth £60 million or more, each of these rather annoying offspring is immediately worth millions and so we already venture into a strange alien world. Add to that clichéd characters, from a posh wife who thinks men are superior and has twin girls obsessed by ponies, to the eco-bore that is the younger son who, surprisingly having held down a job at Dad’s firm for years despite being a hugely principled disciple of the eco-movement, now wants to set up his own “alternative democracy” as government isn’t working. The play is set all on one day when William has summoned the children to discuss matters both business and personal.

I struggled to pick any stand outs from the actors as none of them really convinced to any great degree. I had to strain to pick up all the words at times as voice projection was lacking at some points and words spoken very quickly. Gerald Murphy has some great acerbic, witty lines but fails to convince on an emotional level. I also felt he struggled a little with acting in a wheelchair –  there is one emotional speech where he inches closer and closer to his daughter as he speaks and this just looked odd as he crept forward again and again and detracted from what he was saying.

The set is simple and does its job well. We have the bare bones of a timber barn, surrounded on three sides by huge screens with countryside and hills photographed on them. My one niggle would be that when actors exit to the left they actually leave through a door that is part of the countryside photograph, which seems rather odd, the more so as the door is often opened for them by some invisible person as they approach – most off-putting!

The script is witty in places with the best lines coming when discussing how locals in Stratford regard tourism. Mitchell definitely has a way with words and I was struck by how up-to-date the play and its themes were. Here we have a playwright who is obviously knowledgeable and right on the money when it comes to current trends – we even have mention of rioters! It is therefore a great shame that he tries to pack so much into this play at the expense of characterisation. We need more small moments, less preaching speeches and ultimately more likeable characters. The beauty of Lear is that by the end you feel sorry for the piteous old man that he has become – here it was hard to find anyone who we were rooting for. The ending of the play is also far too neat and tidy and frankly bizarre. I will not give away the plot but the outcome for Kate seems unlikely in the extreme

So a funny play in places, with some witty writing but ultimately a rather unsatisfying muddle