Man and Boy

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 28 February 2026

Anthony Lau directs this revival of Terence Rattigan's 1963 play Man and Boy with Ben Daniels as Gregor Antonescu, Laurie Kynaston as Basil Anthony (actually Gregor's son Vassili), Phoebe Campbell as Carol Penn (Basil's girlfriend), Malcolm Sinclair as the financier Mark Herries, Nick Fletcher as Sven Johnson (Gregor's assistant), Leo Wan as David Beeston (Mark Herries's accountant) and Isabella Laughland as Countess Antonescu (Gregor's wife).

Basil and Carol, in a not entirely satisfying relationship, are unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of Basil's estranged father; his machinations turn out to be the primary focus of the play, presented here in an extraordinary production designed by Georgia Lowe. Rattigan's reputation for stolid settings (here, of a 1930s New York apartment) is blown away, replaced by an almost bare stage with a billiards-green baize carpet and functional tables and chairs such as one might find in a community hall. Furthermore the theatre has been reconfigured so that the stage is in the middle with banks of seats on either side. The acting style is also transformed. Gregor in particular slinks and prowls like a wild, not to say feral, animal, moving with a catlike grace that is at times extremely menacing. The tables are pushed and pulled around the stage and frequently mounted by one or more characters in moments of acute emotional stress.

Watching all this as the unsavoury plot unfolds - Gregor is shamelessly prepared to pimp his son out to a financier as a bribe to forestall the collapse of a business merger threatened because the accountant Beeston has found suspicious transactions in the Antonescu empire - is an intoxicating experience. The entrapment of Mark Herries, bamboozled by fast talking and fatefully corrupted by the tantalising offer of a young man's services (with no idea that Basil is related to Gregor), is a horrifying spectacle, while the level of exploitation involved seems too grotesque for the somewhat naive Basil to grasp.

But the irrepressible Gregor can after all be crushed: momentarily by Basil's excoriating put-down, and more fatefully by the unravelling of his business dealings (though not directly the affair elaborated in the first half of the play). As the background to Gregor's personality and his conflicted attitude to Basil becomes clearer we are on the more familiar Rattigan territory of strained relationships and family dysfunction. The mesmerising intensity of the first half perhaps slackens, and Basil's quixotic attempts to save his father despite his obvious flaws (because it is "the system" that is at fault, as Basil the good socialist maintains) is perhaps not entirely convincing. 

Ben Daniels puts in a superb performance as Gregor, ably matched by the rest of the cast whom he manipulates with consummate ease while his star is in the ascendant. When his world collapses his anguish is equally overblown; we may not be sympathetic after being exposed to his ruthlessness, but it ids easy to recognise his nihilism as the obverse of his frenetic energy.

 All in all this revival only serves to enhance Rattigan's reputation as a first-rate dramatist. 

Lord of the Flies

by Nigel Williams adapted from William Golding's novel

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 11 October 2025

William Golding's famous novel is now over 70 years old and this stage adaptation was written in 1991 for a school production and first performed professionally in 1995. But the big question at the heart of Lord of the Flies still remains all too pertinent: to what extent is "civilised society" just a veneer concealing humanity's innate cruelty and violence. The issue is crystallised in the story of a group of British schoolboys - ostensibly the exemplars of good behaviour - stranded by a plane crash on an uninhabited tropical island with no surviving adults. What will they do?

Notoriously they start with high ideals - mostly suggested by Piggy (Alfie Jallow), who sees the reluctant Ralph (Sheyi Cole) as the obvious person to lead - but these are compromised by boyish inattention to detail, high spirits, and eventually the disruptions caused by the charismatic Jack (Tucker St. Ivany) who disputes Ralph's authority and causes a fateful split. Things only go from bad to worse as Jack's gang becomes increasingly rebellious and violent, partly through inadvertence and partly through Jack's visions of "the Beast".

It is difficult to depict a tropical island on a bare stage, and difficult too to present the group of boys as young enough to match those in the original novel, or even for that matter in Peter Brook's celebrated film. Director Antony Lau and designer Georgia Lowe have made virtues of necessity: the stage is utterly bare, the backstage area starkly revealed to the audience, and it is littered with the moveable crates one sees at airports, which make for handy props. The boys are all young actors, some making their professional debut, but clearly at the very end of their schooldays if not beyond them. In a space that is unadorned, surrounded by black walls and black crates, the cast evokes the island with impressive conviction, and also manages to convey the curious mixture of swagger and insecurity which might typify the reactions of young boys cast on their own resources. Wisely, the boys we see are the "big'uns", while the "little'uns" (the youngest survivors of the crash) are only referred to.

At times it was difficult to understand exactly what was happening: there was too much noise and frenzy on stage. At times there was a strange disconnect between the theatrical space and the imagined space: towards the end of the play Jack seated himself at a piano and gave a spirited rendition of "The Great Pretender" as the chaos that he had unleashed began to spread. But at other times the spectacle was completely engrossing, and the group dynamics superbly realised. The boyish taunts ("stupid" being the ultimate put-down or insult), the playground bullying suddenly turned frighteningly serious, the anxiousness to please authority and the nervousness when authority seemed to be absent, were all convincing. Perhaps the full horror of what happens was weakened by the inescapable fact that the cast was older than the boys they were playing, but it was a fine production of a powerful adaptation..