Dateline: London  –  IS IT A JOKE AIMED AT stereotypical Britishness? Well, it is a British play … and it is about the weather. Actor and now also playwright David Haig’s tautly-named “Pressure” does indeed concern itself with weather systems – and yes, a character does acknowledge at one point the old adage that the weather “is all we British ever talk about!”   

But no – not surprisingly, given its inherent and unremitting drama – this piece is in reality about much more. The pressure being addressed – in a compelling production currently at north London’s Park Theatre – is only partly of the barometric kind, and much more of the military, the political and the emotional sort.

The action takes place during the four days preceding D-Day in 1944, at that time expected to be June 5th, and the play’s central tension plays out between the Allied Forces’ chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, who happens to be a Brit (more accurately, and tellingly, a Scot) and a rival weatherman, Colonel Irving P Krick who is senior forecaster for the US Armed Forces.

Perhaps running counter to national stereotypes, the American (played by Philip Cairns) doggedly bases his forecasts for the day of invasion on previous weather records, while the Brit takes a wider, looser approach, and intuits some less obvious climatic developments (in what was then still an under-researched realm, “the upper air”) that could disastrously threaten the joint forces’ Normandy landings. The Brit even calls the American’s methodology “archaic”.

THE MEN’S DIFFERING FORECASTS – presented with great fervor, and even some deviousness on each side – clearly confront the overall Allied Commander, US General Dwight D Eisenhower with a grave dilemma. And through a portrayal by Malcolm Sinclair that’s just this side of caricature, we gain some feel for a chief’s decision-making agonies when hundreds of thousands of lives – not to mention the defeat of Adolf Hitler – hang upon making the right choice.

Heavy headwinds cut across the play’s main trajectory (if I can dip into forecasters’ vocabulary – it’s irresistible, after all) in the form of emotional entanglements evident among the cast. There is Ike’s relationship (intimate or not?) with his British army driver Kay Summersby (played by a brisk but also sensitive Laura Rogers, pictured below with Haig), and there’s also Stagg’s anxiety about his wife’s imminent, and potentially dangerous, delivery of a child.

Mrs Stagg is in a hospital far distant from the play’s setting – the locked-down and communications-blocked Allied Headquarters on England’s southern coast. The real-life baby’s timing was unfortunate, but it is undeniably handy for the present-day dramatist eager to crank up theatrical tension.

Haig takes the plum role of Stagg for himself – mastering impressively not just the dichotomy of a stiff yet impassioned personality, but also an accent that’s non-native for him. This while much of the time affecting a weary patience when targeted by the hackneyed anti-Scottish darts that he’s written into the combative dialogue. It should be said that manful efforts are also made at American accents, by both Sinclair and Cairns, who are both British. (And a little curiously in this linguistic context, both actors bear decidedly Hibernian names, though only Cairns is a full-fledged Scot, with Sinclair hailing from London.)

Director John Dove, also known for Farinelli and The King with Mark Rylance, has taken Pressure from its beginnings in Edinburgh to Chichester for a successful spell. Now here in the adventurous small venue of The Park, Dove gives the play’s only setting – The Forecast Room in the Georgian manor-house requisitioned as the Allies’ command-post – a distinctly homespun, low-tech feel, helped deftly by designer Colin Richmond. That plainness perhaps stands to get a bit more sophisticated … now that the production is (deservedly) moving on to the grander venue of the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End. The transfer will take place on the aptly resonant date of June 6th.

It’s no plot-spoiler (given any knowledge of WW2 history) to report that D-Day was finally delayed from June 5th by another 24 hours – fully vindicating, in this telling of the story, Stagg’s argument. But it’s the cast’s and director’s victory that the audience repeatedly gets pushed to the edge of its collective seat as the human conflict rages back and forth like a ferocious storm – and yes, it is all about The Weather.