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It’s easy to be snooty about both Sienna Miller and Britain’s nostalgia for its wartime heroes – but critics agree the combination makes for a jolly good show It is easy , and enjoyable, to snigger at Britain’s vision of its wartime flying heroes. The awfully wholesome banter, the Mansellian moustaches , the jovially racist dog-naming , the dark emotions, sealed in concrete, buried and forgotten 50 feet below some Hampshire rugger field. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Flare Path, Terence Rattigan’s 1941 play about the concealed strains of a bomber crew and their wives, had almost all the critics struggling to control their upper lips. “A masterly piece of theatre,” writes Sam Marlowe of The Arts Desk. “This is essentially a shattering ensemble work, in which every detail glows with truth, compassion and humanity, and where every seemingly ordinary second of life in an existence hemmed in by the ever-present threat of death is charged with a quiet intensity.” “The occasional romanticism is counterbalanced by Rattigan’s genius for barely expressed emotion,” agrees our own Michael Billington . “A simple exchange of goodbyes between a tail-gunner and his wife, as he leaves for a raid, brings a lump to the throat.” And it does even more to Charles Spencer. “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” he writes . “Trevor Nunn’s superb production [is] a three-handkerchief weepie that somehow manages to be both profoundly moving and wonderfully funny.” And to think the show’s publicity revolved around its star name, Sienna Miller, about whom it is also easy to be snooty. Pretty young things made famous by their film-star former boyfriends make big targets, remember. So it is remarkable, again, that the critics ( this time ) held their fire. “She brings to her role just the right mixture of glacial poise and agonised tension,” says Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. And, in the Independent, Paul Taylor agrees : “Her performance as the conflicted actress-heroine,” he says, “is genuinely heart-tugging in the subtle way it communicates this young woman’s struggle between patriotic duty and extra-marital desire.” But if Miller did well, her castmates did better still. David Benedict singles out “a career-making performance” from Harry Hadden-Paton, “[whose] character detail is there but not on display. It’s the fuel he uses to charge up his difficult, climactic breakdown.” Meanwhile, Sheridan Smith ( now always to be known as “Olivier-award-winning scrubber Sheridan Smith”) is singled out for special praise by almost everyone. “She is wonderful as the barmaid married to a Polish airman,” says Libby Purves on a page you can’t read , “naive, cheerful, yet radiating immense doubt and pain in stillness.” “Smith is superb,” concurs the FT’s Sarah Hemming . “Always warm and impish, she becomes heartbreaking as she sits, smiling determinedly through her tears, while Peter gently translates for her a letter left behind by her husband.” Meanwhile, for balance, here are the views of the Express’s Paul Callan , who seems to have been watching a different show from everybody else. “All these stereotypes sadly combine to show the age-lines on this play,” he says. “The pace limps along like a battle-battered Wellington bomber flying on one engine.” Ah well, you can’t please everyone. Do say: “Chocks away!”, “Pip-pip!” and “squiffy”. As frequently as possible. Don’t say: Er … they were, you know, dropping bombs on people and stuff. The reviews reviewed: Jolly good show. Theatre Sienna Miller Leo Benedictus guardian.co.uk