At the Donmar, Family Disarray

That’s the idea, though it is being sorely tested at the moment at the Donmar Warehouse. A triptych of Robert Holman plays, “Making Noise Quietly” is in revival at the Covent Garden playhouse through May 26. Mr. Holman’s banner title for the show overall refers specifically only to the last, longest and least satisfying of the trio.

The memory can, of course, play all manner of tricks. I recall being quite moved by this same sequence of plays when I first came to it in 1986 within the tiny confines of the Bush Theatre in West London, whose more recent artistic director, Josie Rourke, moved across town this year to take up the helm at the Donmar. (Ms. Rourke was about 20 years away from running the Bush when Mr. Holman’s triptych was first staged there.)

In any case, here “Making Noise Quietly” is a quarter-century on, its program carrying a generous tribute from the writer David Eldridge (“Festen,” “In Basildon”) to Mr. Holman, who has somewhat receded from view of late. And, truth to tell, what I recollect as gently revelatory now tries the patience, or perhaps it’s simply that time and a larger theater have done their bit to poke holes in a mosaic that seemed more tellingly woven way back when.

All three of Mr. Holman’s imaginings involve encounters between strangers brought together in times of war, though these skirmishes happen well away from the battlefield. The first, “Being Friends,” is set in a pastoral corner of Kent, southeast England, in 1944 as the soundscape of explosives moves ever-nearer. A conscientious objector by the name of Oliver (Jordan Dawes) is sunbathing in a state of semi-undress when he finds an unexpected companion in the bespectacled, sexually suggestive Eric (Matthew Tennyson), who parks his bicycle so that the two 20-somethings can have a chat — and perhaps more.

Their exchange is accompanied by a parry and thrust of advancing sweetness as the two young men cross various divides by way of a courtship that rarely announces itself as such. “If I was like you, I don’t think I could admit it to anyone,” is all Oliver will say at first on the topic of same-sex leanings, though he eventually succumbs to the artistically minded Eric’s gauche charms. Under the direction of Peter Gill, a dramatist whose own work has in the past charted similar comminglings, Mr. Dawes and Mr. Tennyson move touchingly and without fuss toward a shared ease that comes to a halt with the oblique grace of a self-sufficient short story. Less, yet again, is more.

The playlets that follow complement the opener superficially but not in terms of substance. “Lost” is set in the northeast of England in 1982, where a naval officer, Geoffrey (John Hollingworth), has come to inform May (Susan Brown), about the death in the Falklands War of her son, from whom, it soon emerges, she was estranged. May’s grievous encounter with this unwanted visitor in her midst includes a belated admission from Geoffrey that he may have a stronger connection to the household than he at first let on. The air is thick with contrivance, not pathos.

“Lost” gives off a sense of parents and children requiring intermediaries to know one another, by way of contrast with Oliver’s report to Eric in the earlier play of a family that’s “very close.” After the intermission, we arrive at the piece that grants the evening its banner title, only to find that domestic ties have frayed further still. This time, we’re in the Black Forest one summer day in 1986 at the home of a middle-aged German Jew, Helene (Sara Kestelman), who has offered sanctuary to a volatile, much younger British soldier, Alan (Ben Batt), and his 8-year-old stepson, Sam. (Three child actors alternate in that part. I saw Lewis Andrews, who possesses extraordinary lungs.)