Summer 1954

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 24 January 2025

James Dacre directs two one-act Rattigan plays, Table Number Seven (from Separate Tables) and The Browning Version, in a double bill, unifying the plays by emphasising their setting in the early 1950s, though actually The Browning Version was written in 1948. (Usually the first play is shown together with Table by the Window set earlier in the same hotel, while the latter is performed with the light-hearted Harlequinade.) 

In both plays Rattigan displays his mastery in examining and exposing the threat to genuinely humane feelings posed by the rigid social niceties of his time; in each he offers a glimmer of hope that some characters at least will escape the suffocating pressures that have so far blighted their lives.

The separate tables are in the dining room of a residential hotel in Bournemouth, a perfect microcosm of faded and repressed middle-class gentility. The permanent residents are dominated by the fearsome Mrs Railton-Bell (Siân Phillips), but even more dominated is her fragile daughter Sybil (Alexandra Dowling). Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) provides the most colour, but he is revealed to be a fraud when Mrs R-B spots an account of a trial in the local newspaper. The machinery of middle-class morality, amusingly satirised by George Bernard Shaw in plays such as Pygmalion, is here more vitriolic, but the good graces of the hotel manager Miss Cooper (Lolita Chakrabarti) encourage a rebellion whereby the formidable Mrs R-B is the character finally isolated by her prejudice. Thus in microcosm, with finely observed social dynamics, a plea for tolerance is made.

In the second play Nathaniel Parker and Lolita Chakrabarti take the roles of Andrew and Millie Crocker-Harris, a desiccated schoolmaster on the verge of early retirement due to ill-health and his far more vivacious wife, who have long ago fallen out of love with each other. Again the world of a minor boys' public school provides the perfect setting for Rattigan's cool examination of thwarted hopes and desperate remedies; it is extraordinary that the gift of a book from a schoolboy uninterested in classics to a dry and rule-bound master can be so affecting, and a single slap to the face can be so shocking, but in a play where turbulent emotions are almost impossible to express, these are highly charged moments.

The production is smart and well-designed on the open-thrust stage (Mike Britton responsible), and the supporting characters - down-at-heel hotel residents in the first play, an odious headmaster, a compromised colleague, all-too-eager newcomers and a boy with finer feelings than might be expected in the second - provide a rich environment for the central dilemmas to play out. Rattigan, once central to the English theatre, then sidelined by younger playwrights in these very 1950s, is more and more shown to be well worth revisiting.

Life of Pi

by Lolita Chakrabarti based on Yann Martel's novel

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 11 June 2022

After the erudite expositions of Socratic philosophy in Cancelling Socrates, I saw on the same day a rather different approach to dramatising fundamental questions about existence in Lolita Chakrabarti's inventive adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, in which a young boy (Hiran Abeysekera, ably supported by a dozen cast members and assorted puppeteers) first faces and then accounts for a lengthy voyage across the Pacific Ocean adrift in a lifeboat as the only human survivor of a shipwreck (he is accompanied by a number of animals including a huge Bengal tiger incongruously named Richard Parker).

The play, directed by Max Webster with brilliant set and costume designs by Tim Hatley, opens in the hospital in Mexico where Pi is recovering from his ordeal; representatives of the Canadian consulate (Pi and his family were due to settle in Canada) and the Japanese owners of the wrecked ship are interviewing him to try to find out what happened, but are baffled by the extravagant story he tells of shipping a zoo from India to Canada, and the perils of sharing a small lifeboat with a large tiger.

Here is another play in which narrative plays a significant part, but it is only a framing device, quickly seguing into dramatic reconstructions of the major events of Pi's story; with a dazzling array of video projections and more traditional opening and closing of doors and walls the coldly lit hospital ward is transformed into the vibrant town in which Pi and his family live, the port of embarkation, and the cramped conditions of the ocean-going vessel. Lastly the outlines of the lifeboat emerged as if by magic from the stage floor as the vast loneliness of the ocean was evoked by waves projected onto the floor and expansive vistas of sky elsewhere on the stage. All the while, fantastic puppetry designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell and directed by the latter brings to life the animals and ocean creatures encountered by the resilient boy at the centre of the story.

The boy has grown up exposed to three very different religious traditions - Hinduism, Islam and Christianity - and has participated in the communal aspects of all of them perhaps without deeply understanding their theological underpinnings. However he remains touchingly convinced that a religious outlook on life is essential; atheists he can cope with because at least they have a belief, while agnostics simply flummox him. This attitude undoubtedly helps him to survive even as the cold rationality of his intercolutors threatens to unhinge him; it's a remarkable testimony to the power of stagecraft, as much as to the power of fiction, that we are on his side as he asserts his right to tell his own story in his own way.

It was really exhilarating to see a play rush headlong through a strong and exciting tale with such confidence and energy.