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.

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles

seen at the Gielgud Theatre on 17 November 2021

This Royal Shakespeae Comany production, directed by Jeremy Herrin, is an adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novel of the same name, the third in her account of the life and career of Thomas Cromwell. The first two novels had been adapted by Mike Poulton for the RSC in 2014 (before I began my blog). Ben Miles as Cromwell and Nathaniel Parker as Henry VIII reprise their roles from the earlier plays, and are both excellent.

The novel is long (by far the longest of the three) and complex, as the final two years of Cromwell's life were full of intrigue and interest. Mantel also imagined his interior life, with many episodes of recollection from his boyhood and youth elaborating on scenes glimpsed in the early parts of Wolf Hall (the first book). Most of the introspection has perforce been stripped out, though glanced at in the play by the occasional appearance of Cromwell's father Walter and his principal mentor Cardinal Wolsey as ghostly figures, an idea that seems at times rather too camp to be effective.

The political struggles are wisely and competently simplified to concentrate on the demise of Henry's third queen Jane Seymour and the negotiations for the fourth marriage to Anna of Cleves. Famously this foundered on the king's displeasure at actually meeting his bride, but Mantel mischievously proposes that she also was less than enamoured at the unheralded arrival of a rather overbearing and by this time physically less than attracitve man. All this was well played in a versatile setting designed by Christopher Oram (inherited directly from the previous adaptations).

I have read the novel recently, and felt that this added some richness to the experience of watching the play, since some fleeting references resonated with my memories of the more extended treatment in the book. The play (and the book) suffer from a lack of tension since the outcome is hardly unknown; this inevitalby reduces the suspense. Of course, one could say the same thing about Shakespeare's history plays, though the plays in the more mature tetralogy (Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V) are arguably more memorable for the investigation of character than for mere historical information. I am not sure that these Cromwell plays will prove of such long-lasting interest. There was, for example, no attempt to revive the first two plays to coincide with the arrival of this last part, though maybe such an ambitious project would have been considered were it not for the deleterious effects of the pandemic on theatrical life.

An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville THeatre on 5 June 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the third major production. Jonathan Church directs Sally Britton as Lady Chiltern, Nathaniel Parker as Sir Robert Chiltern, Faith Omole as Miss Mabel Chiltern, Frances Barber as Mrs Cheveley, Susan Hampshire as Lady Markby, Edward Fox as the Earl of Caversham and Freddie Fox as his son Viscount Goring.

This play has more substance than Lady Windermere's Fan (reviewed in March this year); though perhaps this is a modern conclusion, since the potential scandal driving the plot is one of political corruption rather than the revelation of illegitimate birth. Mrs Cheveley wishes to blackmail Lord Chiltern (a member of the government) into supporting a shady foreign deal because she has irrefutable evidence of the fact that he based his fortune on selling a Cabinet secret many years before. Although she is eventually foiled, and we are on the whole glad that this is the case (since she is herself hardly a moral paragon), the situation nevertheless raises many pertinent questions about loyalty, honesty, public power and private integrity, and there is no doubt that she scores many points.

This House

by James Graham

seen at the Garrick Theatre on 11 January 2017

Directed by Jeremy Herrin, this production has transferred from Chichester, though the play was first presented at the National Theatre in 2012. It features Nathaniel Hawthorne as Jack Weatherill (the Tory Deputy Chief Whip), Steffan  Rhodri as Walter Harrison (the Labour Deputy Chief Whip), with Malcolm Sinclair as the Tory Chief Whip, Phil Daniels as the Labour Chief Whip (until his demise), and Lauren O'Neill as Ann Taylor, the only female (Labour) whip. Other cast members take various parts as MPs both lesser known and famous - there are cameo appearances for John Stonehouse, Norman St Jon Stevas and Michael Heseltine.

The set represents the House of Commons, and some members of the audience are seated as if on the Commons benches or in the visitors' galleries. Adroit lighting turns parts of the stage into other Parliamentary venues, in particular the Government and Opposition Whips' offices (there's a delicious joke that the Government office has chairs with adjustable seats whereas the Opposition has to make so with ordinary - though still not uncomfortable - chairs). The play examines the fraught years from 1974 to 1978 when Labour formed the government firstly in a hung parliament and then with the slenderest of majorities, leading to desperate measures to ensure that crucial votes were passed, thus avoiding a vote of no confidence.