Strange Interlude, National Theatre, review But if Strange Interlude looks back to the past in its style, it will also strike viewers with its modernity. For the piece has much in common with a really first rate TV soap or drama series as the characters private lives become ever more fraught and complex over a time span of 25 years. Yet despite its account of love, lust, betrayal and madness, the play is often startlingly funny as well as touching. The action begins just after the First World War in a New England University town where Nina, the daughter of a professor, is distraught with grief following the death of her air-ace fiancé who was shot down and killed just two days before the armistice. She bitterly regrets that she didn't have sex with him before he went to war, and throughout one is struck by just how daringly frank the play is for its period. Her father, and her fussy older mummy's boy of an admirer fear for her mental health, until a doctor suggests that she should marry an engagingly ineffectual young man and have a child to jolt her out of her morbid misery. The only problem is that unbeknownst to her future husband, inherited insanity runs in his family and his mother tells Nina she must never have a child by him. So Nina aborts the child she has already conceived, has an affair with the doctor and becomes pregnant by him, passing her son off as her husband's. All this takes some swallowing. But the psychological perception and emotional rawness of O'Neill's writing, coupled with the superb performances and emotional truth of Simon Godwin's gripping production, brilliantly designed by Soutra Gilmour, make it surprisingly easy to suspend one's disbelief. The performances are superb. As the troubled Nina Anne-Marie Duff brings a thrilling raw intensity to the stage, as well as capturing fulfilled sexual passion in her adulterous affair and deep maternal love. As the doctor Darren Pettie has a dark allure and sexual swagger that put me in mind of Clark Gable and the chemistry between the pair really fizzes. Charles Edwards is often wonderfully funny as the prissy old bachelor who also holds a torch for Nina, and Jason Watkins is both touching and highly entertaining as the delightfully dorkish husband who has no idea how he has been deceived. It's a wonderfully gripping production of play that keeps springing surprises to the end