Entertainment

Alan Cox’s star-making performance in ‘Cornelius’ is a must-see

J.B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls” was a surprise hit when it was revived on Broadway nine years ago. Now comes Priestley’s “Cornelius,” which vanished after its 1935 West End run and hasn’t been seen again until this acclaimed 2012 production by London’s Finborough Theatre.

Now having its New York premiere at the Brits Off Broadway series, featuring a star-making performance by Alan Cox (son of actor Brian) in the title role, it’s a quiet gem that offers generous doses of comedy and pathos.

The play, subtitled “A Business Affair in Three Transactions,” is set in the rundown office of Briggs and Murrison, an aluminumimport firm that’s fallen on hard times. Briggs is dead and Murrison is AWOL, supposedly traveling in the countryside to drum up business. Running the show is the ever-optimistic Jim Cornelius, who’s concerned with staving off its many creditors.

The firm is full of vivid characters: loyal secretary Miss Porrin (Pandora Colin), who pines for her widowed, 50-ish boss; Lawrence (David Ellis), a 19-year-old office boy frustrated by his dead-end job; and elderly bookkeeper Biddle (Col Farrell), who’s so methodical that he’s already shopping around for his own cremation.

The new arrival is a beautiful young secretary, Judy (a luminous Emily Barber), who’s prone to bursting into song and who stirs long dormant feelings in Cornelius.

The Chekhovian theme of unrequited love is but one thread of the play, which also details, through pungent encounters between Cornelius and a stream of peddlers, an unforgiving economic climate that seems awfully resonant today.

Impeccably staged by Sam Yates on David Woodhead’s realistic, ’30s-era office set, the production features superb work by the ensemble. Beverley Klein is particularly impressive in her dual roles as a chatty cleaning woman and a busybody, wealthy creditor.

But it’s Cox’s endlessly engaging turn that gives the play its heart. Quietly despairing at his wasted life and dreaming of searching for “the lost city of the Incas,” his Cornelius is a complex soul who fully engages our sympathies. The play’s final moments, in which he unveils a dizzying array of emotions after revealing his love for a much younger woman, won’t be easily forgotten.