And who should they enlist as their spirit guide in this endeavor but Forster himself? Portrayed with wide-eyed curiosity and a diffident mien by the British actor Paul Hilton, Forster steps out of the past and into the play’s opening scene like a tutelary don strolling through a campus quad, where clean-cut acolytes sprawl and frolic like models for a J. Crew back-to-college catalog. Forster generously gives the boys of “The Inheritance” his blessing to use “Howards End” as the template for the story they’re telling. At that point, you may be tempted to think “The Inheritance” has as much in common with the vintage naïfs-in-the-big-city potboilers of Rona Jaffe and Jacqueline Susann as it does with “Howards End.”The combination of skyscraping reach and soap opera-ish pulp makes “The Inheritance” both easy to make fun of and hard to dislike.

Source: New York Times November 18, 2019 02:37 UTC