In Praise of Love

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 30 May 2025

Amelia Sears directs Dominic Rowan as Sebastian Cruttwell, Claire Price as Lydia Crutwell, Daniel Abelson as Mark Walters and Joe Edgar as Joey Crutwell in a revival of Rattigan's 1973 play in which British reserve is taken to extraordinary lengths as the married couple Lydia and Sebastian try to protect one another from knowledge which each thinks will devastate the other.

Sebastian Cruttwell, exaggerating his pose as a curmudgeonly leftie theatre critic, appears abominably cavalier with his wife, expecting her to see to his every need and to solve the most trivial domestic problems (such as switching on the heater, or plugging in a desk lamp, when he complains the they do not work). Lydia, therefore, is convinced that he would be unable to function without her, despite the fact that he seems to treat her with casual contempt. Rattigan excels at scenes of domestic disharmony in which more is plainly going on than the surface dialogue admits; here are two people, married for twenty-eight years, who seem on the verge of being at loggerheads in the style of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but we don 't have to wait till the end of the play to understand what is at stake: Lydia soon confides in her friend Mark what she is doing. The surprise comes later, when Sebastian also risks a confidential conversation with the same friend, who thus has too much information to know what to do for the best.

Unwittingly caught in this tense situation is the young Joey, infuriating his father by working for the Liberal Party, and aspiring to be a dramatist, very aware of his father's disdain but still all-too-easily hurt by it, and even aware of his mother's tendency to manipulate him, but helpless to avoid it. There is much impassioned talk about the importance of honesty even as both parents are concealing feelings and knowledge in the most brazen way.

I am trying to account for the subtleties in this play without giving away the plot details; suffice it to say that Rattigan's skill in dramatising these sorts of situations, pregnant with undercurrents that cannot be resolved in the way current fashion dictates - or even with the tentative glimmer of hope that flickers at the end of Albee's celebrated play - is undiminished, and the cast in this revival rise to the challenge of portraying these flawed well-meaning people with great success. There is a rapprochement between Joey and his father, even though Sebastian still cannot explain to his son why he has missed a crucial chance to see the boy's first television play - love may be praised as much as honesty, but the practice of it remains hard work and is often compromised.

 

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.

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 29 November 2021

Paul Miller directs a revival of one of the Orange Tree's most successful productions, Terence Rattigan's farce While the Sun Shines, first seen in 2019. Four of the original cast reprise their roles - Paul Labey as the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson as his manservant Horton, Michael Lumsden as his prospective father-in-law the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, and Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert - while three new cast members take the other roles - Rebecca Collingwood as the Earl's fiancée Lady Elizabeth Randall, Sophie Khan Levy as Mabel Crum (an independent woman of considerable acuity), and Conor Glean as the American Lieutenant Mulvaney.

It's a great pleasure to see again this entertaining production of an intricately plotted play in which the surface confusions and rivalries, which could have been merely superficial nonsense, unexpectedly reveal deeper truths about the workings of society and the pitfalls of over-hasty presumptions about how people will behave. There is something Shavian about the twists and turns by which the characters navigate the perils of social expectation and personal happiness.

See also my review of the original production at 

https://nicholasatthetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/06/while-sun-shines.html#more

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 18 June 2019

Paul Miller directs this sparkling revival of one of Rattigan's most successful and popular plays, written in 1943 and set in London - indeed in the celebrated chambers of the Albany off Piccadilly - during the Second World War. In a great ensemble cast Philip Labey plays the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson his manservant Horton, Julian Moore-Cook the American Lieutenant Mulvaney, Sabrina Bartlett the Earl's fiancée Landy Elisabeth Randall, Michael Lumsden her father the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert and Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Mabel Crum.

Love in Idleness

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 22 April 2017

Trevor Nunn directs Eve Best as Olivia Brown, Anthony Head as Sir John Fletcher, Edward Bluemel as Olivia's son Michael and Helen George as Sir John's estranged wife Diana in a wonderful revival of Terrance Rattigan's wartime comedy, with sets designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis.

The play opens in a swank apartment with Olivia on the telephone gushingly trying to arrange a dinner party, persuading a series of guests to attend on each other's accounts. Eve Best excels at this fast-paced society manner, the words pouring out persuasively with hardly a breath taken. Yet we are soon aware that the situation is not exactly straightforward. She answers telephone calls a little warily, pretending anonymity until she knows who is calling; and she seems inept at taking in an important message for Sir John Fletcher, a minister in Churchill's War Cabinet. It transpires that Sir John has installed Olivia in the flat; their romantic involvement is clearly passionate but social respectability is denied them as Sir John cannot afford the scandal of divorce while in the Cabinet.

The Deep Blue Sea

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 15 August 2016

Carrie Cracknell directs Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer, Tom Burke as Freddie Page and Peter Sullivan as William Collyer in this fine revival of Rattigan's 1952 play. 

Tom Scutt's stage design reveals both the living room and the kitchen of the flat where 'Mr and Mrs Page' live, with the bedroom hinted at when necessary through a gauze screen. Behind the door to the flat we can glimpse the common stairway to other flats, and indeed the main walls of the storey above are also revealed instead of implying an implausibly high ceiling. This clever use of the space allows other residents to come and go (mainly one presumes leaving for work in the morning and returning in the evening), reminding us that we are being shown just one crisis in one flat amongst thousands.

French Without Tears

by Terence 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.