French Without Tears

by Terrence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 11 November 2015

Terrence Rattigan's reputation, skewered by the so-called 'Angry Young Men' in the 1950s, has risen again in the last couple of decades with a series of impressive revivals of his more weighty plays. 'French Without Tears', his first major success from 1936, is a farce, but as is often the case with Rattigan, there are serious undertones which point to a real, if unacknowledged, fragility in many of the characters.

This production, directed by Paul Miller, features a young cast, (two professional debuts and several recent graduates) with David Whitworth playing the only senior role, M. Maingot. Managing a farce in a small acting space with the audience on four sides and the front row on the stage floor level is quite an accomplishment, and the actors managed this with enormous vitality and skill. While at times the public schoolboy accents may have seemed a trifle overdone in the small space, the overall effect was completely convincing - another of the secrets of a successful production: if the cast is too knowing or the speaking too exaggerated the effect falls flat.

Genevieve Gaunt smouldered effectively as the femme fatale Diana, before whom no style of masculine solidarity could quite muster the strength to be firm. Even the supercilious Alan (an exasperatingly charming Alex Bhat) was almost totally unmanned when she turned her attentions to him. In the meantime Joe Eyre showed us Kit, hopelessly smitten with Diane and unable to see the adoration of Jacqueline Maignot (a sympathetic Sarah Winter, showing a developing sense of cattiness once she got the measure of Diane), and William Bellchambers proved an ideal foil as the apparently prim Commander Rogers, another victim of Diane's wiles. Patrick McNamee, as Diane's younger brother Kenneth, eager and (in this production at least) clearly smitten with Alan, was exactly the right sort of innocent youngster blithely unaware of his emotional needs, while Tom Hanson as the bluff Brian, completely at ease satisfying his needs with a local tart, provided the perfect foil to the idiotic young men around him who are so patently frightened of emotion, commitment, depth of feeling, and even physical expression.

The sexual attitudes, casual misogyny, almost cloying chumminess, and woeful self-ignorance may all be deplored in sober analysis - but they are rather beside the point. They provide the motors for the farcical developments of the play, and Rattigan's mastery can be seen in the subtle nuances of character that indicate something of the cost to personal happiness that these conventions imposed. There are moments when many of the characters are in real pain - Alan, for example when anyone joshes him about his writing, Kenneth, unable to be anything other than puppyish in Alan's presence, Kit, impossibly embarrassed when he realises that he may have a real affection for Jacqueline, and Diane herself as she fleetingly reveals an inner emptiness that compels her to use her 'one gift' to the full for self-preservation. These touches were beautifully conveyed by the cast amidst the hugely enjoyable mayhem of the plot.