Review: ‘Conflict’ Reaches Across the Decades and the Aisle

NEW YORK — Here is a fairy tale for a partisan age. Once upon a time there was a beautiful conservative princess. One day she met a liberal. She went to his rally and then to his room. She followed her heart. She changed her party.

That is the crux of Miles Malleson’s 1925 “Conflict,” an affable relic excavated by the Mint Theater Company and directed by Jenn Thompson. This winning two-act play is part romantic comedy and part political drama. Obviously, it is a period piece because when the characters discuss socialism — which they do, earnestly and often — no one starts trolling them on Twitter. Still, if the settings are fusty, the attitudes are not. Make it past the what-the-devils and the milk-and-sugars and the characters will surprise you.

Lady Dare Bellingdon (Jessie Shelton) is not quite a princess. She is a staggeringly wealthy society girl with a wayward streak. She will not marry her very eligible suitor, Major Sir Ronald Clive (Henry Clarke), a rising Tory politician, as she is unready to “give up my dreams of something Unknown and Wonderful happening,” she says. She finds the Unknown and Wonderful in Ronald’s Labour rival, Tom Smith (Jeremy Beck).

Dare ought to be lavishly annoying. She is an interwar forebear of today’s manic pixie dream girls, quirky and quixotic enough to fascinate everyone around her. That name says it all. Luckily Dare is played by Shelton, an actress with smarts and irrepressible charm. In this may-the-best-man-win drama, she is the woman to watch. The playful costumes of Martha Hally are a definite help. Clarke is a doughty Ronald and Beck a forceful if not wildly appealing Tom. As the blustering Lord Bellingdon, the engaging Graeme Malcolm could just let his first-class mustache do the work for him, but he uses the rest of his face and body, too.

Last year, the Mint produced Malleson’s “Yours Unfaithfully,” a dramedy about an open marriage. That play had more psychological acuity than “Conflict” and a more elegant structure. (Some of the “Conflict” exposition creaks like mismatched floorboards.) But both plays argue for Malleson as a playwright of insight and wit and cool compassion. He is also a writer who takes sex seriously. And it never occurs to him to punish his characters for wanting it and having it. That gets my vote.

He rarely lets the politics overwhelm the romance. (And when he does, as in a nifty Shavian scene between Tom and his landlady, that is fun, too.) I was never really sure whether Dare shifts her allegiances because of Tom’s platform, his “vision of a saner, happier world,” or because of the man himself. Could be principles. Could be pheromones. But if it is the principles she goes for, it is nice to think that humane concern for others could nudge a Lady left. (In less anguished times, the Ivanka joke would go here.)

Yet if the play stands with Tom, it never smears Ronald. There are no ogres here. Malleson assumes the basic decency of both men and both parties and it is a shame that the Beckett Theater does not have any aisles because “Conflict” reaches across them so neatly. It argues, as Tom tells Dare, “for giving the best in human nature a chance.”

In England in 1925, the 25-year-old Dare would not have had the right to vote. But just three years later she would. And the play suggests she will use it as well as the men. As happily ever afters go, it will do.

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Through July 21 at the Beckett Theater at Theater Row; 212-239-6200, minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.