Theatre Review: French Without Tears (Orange Tree Theatre)

 Joe Eyre, Florence Roberts and Ziggy Heath in French Without Tears
(Photo by: The Other Richard)

It’s both with great delight and a little bit of trepidation that one heads back to the Orange Tree to see French Without Tears, the OT’s co-production with English Touring Theatre, which, revived and (mostly) re-cast, is now back at the theatre before touring later this year. "Delight" because Paul Miller’s staging of Terence Rattigan’s fragrant 1936 comedy was one of 2015’s most purely pleasurable productions; "trepidation" because revisiting favourite productions can carry some risks. Will the show remain as delightful this time around? Or will its pleasures seem diminished in some way? 

Happily, the former proves to be the case here. Miller pitches this revival so perfectly, with so much charm and intelligence and lightness of touch, that resistance is pretty much futile, whether you’re seeing the show for the first or the second time.  

Rattigan’s play takes place on the west coast of France, where a group of young Englishmen have gathered for the summer to study French for the Diplomatic exam at Monsieur Maingot’s “cram school”. Cross-cultural and (especially) linguistic misunderstandings come to the fore, but, mostly,  the play (which was Rattigan’s first hit) is all about the romantic complications that the protagonists find themselves embroiled in, involving the arch-temptress Diana and Maingot’s daughter Jacqueline.

"Is there something more to this than a mere frolic?" wonders Dan Rebellato in his programme essay. Well, compared to the bruising and cathartic likes of The Deep Blue Sea  (currently at the National Theatre in Carrie Cracknell’s fine production), the answer has to be: "No." Yet, watching French Without Tears again, the beauty of its construction becomes even more apparent, as does the surprising amount of nuance that Rattigan brings to his characterisation of the protagonists which, while sharp and wry, never resorts to mean-spirited mockery, and gives the actors plenty of opportunity to go beyond caricature.

The two cast members reprising their roles – David Whitworth as Prof Maingot and Joe Eyre as Kit – both excel again, with Eyre, in particular, skilfully underplaying (even when dressed in one of the year’s most outrageous costumes) to make Kit’s love-sickness and jealousy both funnier and more relatable than I'd remembered it. The new cast members feel equally at home, too, with Tim Delap expertly incarnating a British naval "type" in Commander Rogers: uptight and awkward yet good-hearted and surprisingly perceptive. 

Alex Large makes the uncomplicated Brian (as keen on "tarts" as he is rubbish at French) entirely adorable. Beatriz Romilly invests Jacqueline with sweetness and shrewdness, articulating at least part of the play's perspective when she describes men as "blundering fools". Florence Roberts renders the cooing seductress Diana a more overt manipulator than Genevieve Gaunt did last year, but also clearly makes us understand the motivations of a character  who believes that her only gift is to make men fall in love with her. As the smug observer Alan, Ziggy Heath comes into his own when the character gets knocked off balance by a surprise declaration from Diana.

With a fine design by Simon Daw, and lovely music by David Shrubsole, Miller’s production is perfectly paced and pitched, reaching its comic apex in a wonderful post-revels scene between Rogers, Brian and Kit. Hilarious, loveable, and the ultimate cure for Brexit blues, it’s still hard to imagine seeing Rattigan’s play served better than this.

French Without Tears is booking at the Orange Tree until 30 July. It tours with English Touring Theatre from September to November. Details here. 

Theatre Review: The Winslow Boy (Old Vic)

“Let right be done” is the “time-honoured phrase” at the heart of Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play The Winslow Boy, in which a 14-year-old Royal Naval College cadet, Ronnie Winslow, accused of the theft of a five-shilling postal order, finds himself at the centre of a legal battle spearheaded by his father, Arthur, who’s determined to clear his son’s name. Lindsay Posner’s new production, currently in previews at the Old Vic, certainly “does right” by Rattigan’s great play, elegantly revealing its sorrows, its humour and its hopes. Posner recently screwed up The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida, but he’s on form this time around, delivering a beautiful, deeply felt production that’s entirely absorbing and perfectly judged. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine seeing the play served better than it is here.

Rattigan’s writing formed an important part of British cultural life in 2011 – the playwright’s centenary year which saw London productions of Flare Path and Cause Célèbre, revivals of queerish minor gems such as While the Sun Shines and a great Chichester season dedicated to his work (reviews here, here and here), plus Terence Davies’s not-so-great film of The Deep Blue Sea, of course. Like the best of those productions, The Winslow Boy again reveals Rattigan’s strengths as a dramatist: watertight structure, elegant dialogue, perceptive characterisation, humanity of vision. Unlike The Deep Blue Sea and (to a lesser extent) The Browning Version, though, The Winslow Boy doesn’t have sex at its centre (or on its sidelines, either) and so can seem a tamer proposition than those later plays by comparison. A courtroom drama that (praise be) never shows us the inside of a courtroom, it feels like the sort of work that should have dated, with its characters’ earnest musings on justice, innocence and individual liberty.

And yet, without resorting to anything remotely tricksy (his production is "traditional" in the best sense of the word), Posner makes the piece feel fresh and reveals it to be both funny and quirky. Not only do individual lines surprise you with their relevance, but what’s also striking is the way in which the play keeps calling its own dramatic premise into question. Again and again, characters comment on the wisdom of Arthur’s obsession and ponder whether proving Ronnie’s innocence really matters so very much, especially since the boy (endearingly played by Charlie Rowe here) is soon happily ensconced in a new school and seems oddly indifferent to the outcome of the trial himself.

The point of the play is to show us that it does matter, of course. But the tensions that are raised make the drama much more complex, scene by scene, than the quest-for-justice plot suggests. Rattigan lets our sympathies shift throughout, as doubts, anxieties and convictions move from character to character. Ronnie’s pleasure-loving brother Dickie (Nick Hendrix) feels that “pinching’s nothing” and wonders if the fuss made by their father isn’t “much ado about damn all.” Mother, Grace (Deborah Findlay), also poignantly questions the motives of Arthur (Henry Goodman) for continuing the case as the family come under increasing financial and emotional strain. Their feminist daughter, Catherine (Naomi Frederick), shares her father’s conviction about the trial’s importance (though not for precisely the same reasons). But she, like the rest of the family, ends up making a considerable sacrifice for it. This being Rattiganland any such privations are borne “with fortitude,” natch.

The play’s showiest role is that of Sir Robert Morton, the lawyer hired by Arthur to make the family’s case against the Admiralty, and who’s misjudged as “a hard, cold-blooded, supercilious fish” by Catherine. Jeremy Northam’s take on the part in David Mamet’s fine film of the play casts a long shadow but Peter Sullivan invests the character with an engaging wry authority here. Still what counts the most in Posner’s production is the family context, and the actors succeed in fleshing out an entirely convincing dynamic. Proper yet mildly eccentric, loving but seldom friction-free, you believe in them completely as a family unit. Henry Goodman is gripping as the driven patriarch, whose own health suffers for his single-mindedness in pursuing the case. At first it seems that Deborah Findlay is resorting to the mannered mode she employed in the NT’s Timon of Athens last year - voice sliding down at the end of lines; hands stabbing out in gestures - but the performance takes hold gradually, as the actress shows maternal warmth and frustration at Arthur’s obsession finally settling into an amused, what-the-hell exuberance and resolve to enjoy the courtroom spectacle.

Charismatic Nick Hendrix – channelling a similar kind of easy-going charm to that which he displayed a couple of years ago in ETT’s wonderful Eden End – makes Dickie Winslow puppyishly loveable; when, near the end, this genial fellow talks cheerfully about the prospect of going to war (the rumble of which is felt throughout Rattigan’s play, which covers 1912 to 1914) it’s a truly chilling moment. (On a personal note, I quibble with Dickie on just one point: you can indeed “keep late hours in Reading.”)

The expert Naomi Frederick brings exactly the right kind of candour and directness to Catherine, and Jay Villiers does a gem of a supporting turn as the lawyer who loves her, blushing with pride when recognised for his cricketing prowess, but never made a mere figure of fun. Posner’s production, classily designed by Peter McKintosh and lovingly lit by Tim Mitchell, ensures that every encounter between these characters carries its precise emotional weight and the near-3 hour running time zips by. In sum: an exquisite evening that’s not to be missed.

The production is booking until 25 May. Further information at the Old Vic website.

Theatre Review: The Art of Concealment (Jermyn Street Theatre)

Last year, as part of its season to celebrate Terence Rattigan’s centenary, Chichester Festival Theatre staged Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, a new play that combined scenes from a never-produced Rattigan screenplay with a biodrama focusing on the playwright’s later life. The result was a somewhat awkward hybrid that flitted unsatisfactorily between the two narrative strands, precluding full involvement in either.

Rattigan-as-protagonist now returns in Giles Cole's The Art of Concealment, a play that was originally commissioned for last summer’s Brighton Festival Fringe and which now takes up residence at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Drawing upon the two major Rattigan biographies by Geoffrey Wansell and Michael Darlow, Cole’s play is a more satisfying and insightful piece of work than was Wright’s, fashioning what is in essence a memory play from the details of Rattigan’s life. The action begins on the eve of the opening of Cause Célèbre in 1977 and finds the ailing, elderly Rattigan reflecting upon the direction of his life, his relationships with his parents and his lovers, and his painful fall from critical and commercial favour.

Although the flashback structure, and the device of having Rattigan act as a commentator on his own experiences, results in some clumsy moments of excessive editorialising, the material feels more elegantly worked than in Wright’s play, and Knight Mantell’s tightly-controlled production holds the interest. As its title indicates, the play zeroes in on the notion of “concealment” as it applies both to Rattigan’s personal and professional life. “Concealment” is indeed a word that forms a refrain in the Darlow text, the biographer summarising Rattigan, finally, as “a man whose life had been devoted to forms of concealment and role-playing.” Given Rattigan’s reticence there is at times an uncomfortable suggestion of invaded privacy about the enterprise, as well as the feeling that the play may to some extent perpetuate a sentimentalised image of the playwright as a victim - of English sexual intolerance on the one hand and of the Royal Court revolution on the other.

The spelling-it-out obviousness of some moments here also suggests that the play has less to offer those already familiar with the facts of Rattigan’s life. But what the production does offer that the biographies don’t is the pleasure of performance. Dominic Tighe brings his customary grace and matinee-idol appeal to the younger Rattigan (what a great Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea he’d make!), skillfully presenting the protagonist as a man of both kindness and coldness. Even at his liveliest - when entertaining his chums with a Gielgud impersonation, say - Tighe keeps a tantalising aura of guardedness about him, that of a man who learnt early on to compartmentalise his life because “one has to be so careful about the things one reveals.” As the older Rattigan, Alistair Findlay is stuck with the play’s clunkier dialogue (“A Taste of Honey! To me it was a slap in the face!”). But the performance deepens in the later stages when he becomes a participant rather than a commentator on the drama.

Graham Pountney does amusing work as Rattigan’s philandering, philistine father Frank and in the (invented) role of Freddie Gilmour, a queeny director with a neat line in put-downs, while Judy Buxton is touching and vivid as Rattigan’s mother Vera who’s more generously portrayed here than she was in Rattigan’s Nijinsky. Buxton also gets a good late scene as “Aunt Edna” - the archetypal theatregoer evoked by Rattigan in his Prefaces - who here appears to confront the playwright about the ways in which he may have underestimated his audience. And there’s well-judged support from Daniel Bayle as Kenneth Morgan, and from Charlie Holloway as Michael Franklin, the volatile young man dismissed by Rattigan’s friends as a chancer but who ended up staying with Rattigan until the end of the latter’s life.

What Cole’s play doesn’t quite do justice to, perhaps, is the function that Rattigan’s emphasis on discretion - his mastery of the art of concealment, as it were - served for him as a dramatist. The abiding fascination with falsity and its revelation is part of the extraordinary tension that Rattigan’s best work can still generate in a theatre, an emotional charge that Cole’s play, for all its engaging moments, doesn’t manage to match.

The production runs for 2 hours 15 minutes and is booking until 28th January.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Film Review: The Deep Blue Sea (Davies, 2011)

Terence Rattigan’s centenary has been commemorated by several major stagings of the playwright’s work this year - including London revivals of Flare Path and Cause Celebre, and an excellent season at Chichester which presented The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version alongside new plays inspired by Rattigan’s life and work.  Apart from a series of films and TV adaptations screened at BFI Southbank, cinema has been slower to celebrate Rattigan’s achievements, however, despite his close association with the medium throughout the 1940s and 50s. 

So the news that Terence Davies would be making his first fiction feature in eleven years with an adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale in the lead roles was a particular cause for celebration, especially for those of us who admire Rattigan and Davies just about equally. Unfortunately, though, and despite some striking and affecting individual moments, the meeting of Terry and Terry hasn’t quite resulted in the perfect marriage that might have been anticipated.

Along with The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy, The Deep Blue Sea is recognised as Rattigan’s most flawlessly-constructed work - the epitome of the “well-made play,” indeed - its water-tight three act structure presenting the final few hours in the affair between Hester Collyer and her younger ex-RAF lover Freddie as they play out in a shabby London boarding house.

Resisting the idea of “just photographing the play,” Davies has - unsurprisingly and justifiably - transformed that structure, developing a non-linear narrative that presents episodes from Hester’s past with Freddie (Hiddleston) and her husband William (Russell Beale) in counterpoint with her present situation, and that clearly reflects Davies’s own abiding concern with the workings of memory. (Unlike the play, the film presents the events entirely from Hester’s point-of-view.) Always strong on ambience, Davies evokes the drear of 1950s London with the feeling with which he conjured 50s Liverpool in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Florian Hoffmeister’s misty, soft-focus cinematography and James Merifield's production design sustaining a distinctive - though not precisely pleasurable - oppressive mood. The opening is masterly: a nine-minute sequence scored to Samuel Barber’s gorgeously intense Violin Concerto that pans from the Ladbroke Grove street up the front of the boarding house to find Hester in the throes of her suicide attempt. Davies-land (milk bottles on the doorstep, sounds of “the wireless”) and Rattigan-land form a perfect synthesis here. And the ending - a beautifully-judged reverse of this sequence - is similarly strong.

It’s in the middle that things get a little sticky, at times. For it’s hard not to conclude that, in re-jigging the play’s structure, Davies has removed the material’s dramatic motor. The film drifts and dribbles, tension (and humour) dissipating in sequences that sometimes feel stilted and look posed. And the new scenes and characters that Davies has devised don’t, for the most part, seem like improvements upon those he’s excised. Especially ill-advised is a bogus early sequence - striving for bitchy wit and missing the target - that finds Hester facing off with her monstrous mummy-in-law (Barbara Jefford), the latter helpfully underlining the societal forces that Hester is up against when she intones “Beware of passion... It always leads to something ugly.” (The first part of that quote has become the film’s tagline.) As Hester’s parson pater the great Oliver Ford Davies is wasted in a similarly superfluous scene in which Hester seeks his counsel (in church! Wouldn’t he grant her an audience at home?) only to be rebuffed. Such moments seem, for Davies, atypically crass ways of ensuring audience sympathy with Hester, and emphasising the rebelliousness of her actions.

Elsewhere, the director’s movie-ardour leads him into a few unfortunate indulgences too, including a Blitz flashback that seems to express nothing more than the filmmaker’s pleasure at devising an elaborate tracking shot, and a Brief Encounter homage for Hester’s second suicide attempt. (It might have been more fun if Davies had had Hester and Freddie duck into an illicit matinee at one point - to watch Alec and Laura ducking into their illicit matinee in Brief Encounter, perhaps?)

There's a crucial piece of miscasting, too, I'd argue. Weisz's commitment to the role is evident in every scene, and she acquits herself admirably throughout. But even in her strongest moments here (such as a great final scene) her performance never completely transcends the fact that she seems about ten years too young for the role, an issue that, I think, does diminish our sense of Hester's transgressiveness in falling for Freddie in the first place. (“She looks younger than he does,” mused my companion at one point.) And the re-ordering of the scenes impacts upon the arc of the character: as Davies has re-arranged the material, Hester becomes more hysterical when Freddie storms out for the evening than she does when he announces that he’s leaving her for good.

Even though he’s been directed to overdo Freddie’s RAF-slang and his belligerence (especially in an over-pitched argument scene set in an art gallery), the engaging Hiddleston comes through with a good performance. Two pub singalong scenes - quintessential Davies moments, of course - turn out to be two of the finest innovations here, adding more to our sense of Freddie and Hester’s relationship than most of the new dialogue does.

And, playing William the cuckold, it’s great to see Simon Russell Beale in a decent screen role for once. Hester and William's scenes here may lack the deep sense of complicity and history that other actors have brought to them, but Russell Beale conveys William’s predicament with touching understatement. And Davies succeeds in bringing out the poignancy of this triangle, made up of three protagonists who all desire different kinds of love.

But apart from Harry Hadden-Paton, who’s likeable in an expanded role as Freddie’s friend Jackie Jackson, the supporting roles feel somewhat mismanaged. As Miller, Karl Johnson suffers the most from the cuts, his pivotal role - which, according to Davies, “no-one is convinced by” - reduced to a bit of disgruntled comic business. Ann Mitchell portrays the grimmest Mrs. Elton ever seen before being transformed into a sentimentalised salt-of-the-earth font-of-wisdom towards the end, replacing Miller as the person to shift Hester’s perspective on her situation with the pearl: “Suicide? No-one’s worth it.” (Now how about that as the movie’s tag-line?)

Davies’s two previous adaptations - the underrated The Neon Bible (1995) and the great The House of Mirth (2000) - seemed like pretty seamless, dynamic mergings of his highly distinctive sensibility and those of the creators of the novels. Here, in contrast, the director’s admirable but sometimes heavy-handed drive to cinematise Rattigan’s material proves less successful overall. There are, to be sure, many elements to admire in Davies’s Deep Blue Sea. But along the way a level of intensity seems to have gone missing.

Theatre Review: South Downs/The Browning Version (Minerva, Chichester)

Chichester Festival Theatre’s Terence Rattigan centenary season concludes in the Minerva with Angus Jackson’s production of The Browning Version, which is paired in this outing with a newly commissioned work by David Hare called South Downs - a “response” to Rattigan’s play, directed by Jeremy Herrin. Rattigan’s venerable 1948 one-acter was originally performed with the author’s Harlequinade, an amusing-enough trifle on theatrical themes. Hare’s play proposes itself as a more substantial and relevant curtain-raiser, however. And it is a decent enough effort, albeit one that looks somewhat pallid compared to Rattigan’s play, and the intensity of emotional response that it is still able to generate.

South Downs isn’t in any sense a radical revisioning of Rattigan’s text but rather a play that draws on themes and issues from The Browning Version: it includes, for example, complementary riffs on teaching, on the benefits (or otherwise) of likeability and charm, and on the role of performance in daily life. And, most obviously, like Rattigan’s play, South Downs unfolds in a boys’ school and pivots upon an act of benevolence that redeems the protagonist’s sense of alienation. In this case, the year is 1962 and the focus is on a 14-year-old pupil named John Blakemore (Alex Lawther), an unhappy boy whose friendship with another pupil, Jenkins (Bradley Hall), is undergoing strain. Dismissed as “showing off,” Blakemore’s endless class-room questioning has pretty much alienated the rest of his classmates as well. But he draws the sympathetic attention of an older boy, Duffield (Jonathan Bailey), whose actress mother (a wry, warm Anna Chancellor) invites Blakemore to tea and offers him a few valuable life-lessons over Fortnum & Mason cake.

Herrin’s spare production conjures the atmosphere of the school, with its petty squabbles and tensions, without fuss, and boasts some strong performances, especially from the younger cast members, most of whom are making their professional debuts. There is perhaps a strain of sentimentality to Hare’s characterisation of the troubled but bright, Camus-reading and CND-supporting Blakemore - the playwright’s hymn to his own sensitivity, intelligence and beautiful alienation at this age, perhaps? But Lawther’s skilful performance cuts through this conception. And Andrew Woodall brings his customary wit and presence to a scene - the play’s best - in which he pompously lectures the students on Alexander Pope.

Hare, who last month was quoted as saying that his recent work has become more journalistic because “there hasn’t been time to dramatise it,” mercifully avoids a journalistic approach in South Downs. But the play isn’t really dramatic either: it lacks a sense of urgency and momentum. Still, the playwright’s gift for enjoyable sharp put-downs is in good form, and if some moments here feel bogus and rigged, others prove quietly affecting.

South Downs sustains interest while it lasts, but when compared with the grace, elegance and cutting emotional insights of The Browning Version Hare’s play simply shrivels up and blows away. No case needs to be made for the greatness of The Browning Version these days, but Jackson’s staging is just about as fine an account as you’re likely to experience. Intimate and full of feeling, it centres on a superb performance from Nicholas Farrell (who’s not given quite enough to do in South Downs) as the unloved schoolmaster Crocker-Harris, dubbed “the Himmler of the Lower Fifth.” As his wife, Millie, Anna Chancellor does well enough to convey the bitterness of a woman trapped in an entirely unsuitable marriage - though her performance ultimately lacks the heft of Judi Dench’s exquisite work in the 1985 TV version. But the always-watchable Mark Umbers brings a beautiful clarity, conviction and moral force to his role as her lover, while, as the student Taplow, Liam Morton pitches his performance exactly right. The scene in which Taplow’s unanticipated gift briefly succeeds in piercing Crocker-Harris’s reserve is, as it should be, the very moving highlight of an altogether excellent production.

South Downs/The Browning Version runs for 2 hours 35 minutes and is booking until 8th October. Further information at the Chichester Festival Theatre website.

Review: 3 Terence Rattigan Adaptations (BFI)

To accompany their major season of Terence Rattigan-scripted films which is underway this month, BFI Southbank have added a selection of television adaptations of Rattigan’s work to the Mediatheque archive, giving viewers a rare (and free!) opportunity to see several key television productions. Over the past week I watched three of the adaptations - The Browning Version (1985) starring Ian Holm and Judi Dench; Cause Célébre (1987), with Helen Mirren and David Morrissey; and The Deep Blue Sea (1994) with Penelope Wilton and Colin Firth - and wanted to record a few thoughts on them here.

Cause Célébre (ITV 1987, dir. John Gorrie)

As an adaptation case study, the most interesting (though not the best) of the three productions is undoubtedly Cause Célébre, Rattigan’s 1977 play about the Alma Rattenbury murder trial which is currently being staged by Thea Sharrock at the Old Vic [review here]. What’s interesting about the TV adaptation is the fairly radical way in which director John Gorrie and screenwriter Ken Taylor have transformed the play. Gone is the clunky parallel plot involving the leader of the jury at the trial; instead the adaptation focuses on Alma’s developing relationship with her young lover George, her family life, the murder of her husband, and the ensuing court case. Though there are loses to this streamlining of the plot, there are also considerable gains in clarity and focus, and, for me, the adaptation made much more sense of the material than Sharrock’s Old Vic production (or indeed Rattigan’s play itself) really succeeded in doing.

The play’s structure at times felt forced, and awkward, as if Rattigan was straining to prove that he could construct a non-linear narrative. Elements that seemed frustratingly sketchy in the original are developed in the TV adaptation, and though the results are, formally, much more conventional, they’re also more emotionally insightful. Alma and George’s relationship is skilfully fleshed out, we get a much clearer sense of Alma’s conflicts as a mother, wife and lover, and Taylor has written some excellent new scenes for the minor characters. The actors benefit from this: Harry Andrews, as Alma’s ill-fated husband, registers strongly, while David Morrissey is also memorable as George, presenting the character as a film-fed fantasist capable of both tenderness and violence. And Mirren is superb, especially in the scene in which Alma finds her husband’s body. In contrast to the somewhat arch and artificial tone of Sharrock’s production, Gorrie’s adaptation grounds the play in naturalistic domestic detail, and the trial scenes (again, judiciously trimmed) are also well-handled, with excellent work from David Suchet as Alma’s shrewd lawyer and from Oliver Ford Davies as George’s defence counsel. (The production is worth seeing simply for Davies’s inimitable delivery of the line “a woman of abnormal sexual appetites.”) This Cause Célébre isn’t quite Rattigan’s Cause Célébre but it’s a worthy account of a flawed play, as well as a fascinating companion piece to the Old Vic production.

The Browning Version (BBC 1985, dir. Michael A Simpson)

                                                                                      
In contrast to Gorrie and Taylor’s fairly free adaptation of one of Rattigan’s lesser-known dramas, Simpson’s The Browning Version and Karel Reisz’s The Deep Blue Sea are thoroughly faithful, and stylistically conservative, renderings of Rattigan’s two best-regarded plays. But both are stunningly good. Eschewing any obvious “opening out” of the action, the two productions are “filmed theatre” in the best sense, placing the emphasis firmly upon dialogue and performance, while also benefiting from the increased intimacy of the close-up and the quick shifts in perspective that the camera provides. The Browning Version has superb performances from Ian Holm as the ageing, unloved Classics schoolmaster Crocker-Harris, and from Judi Dench as his  resentful wife, Millie, who’s involved in an affair with one of her husband’s colleagues (Michael Kitchen). The role of this humourless stickler of a tutor is a challenge for an actor, but Holm plays it to perfection, presenting Crocker-Harris as a man who’s closed himself off from others through a mixture of pride and self-contempt. Dench, meanwhile, brings gusto, and a touch of glamour, to Millie's cruelty, while also making clear the disappointments that have driven her there. (What is it about Dench’s performances? They always make the viewer feel more alert and alive, somehow.) And it’s very pleasing to see the young Steven Mackintosh in an early role as the student, Taplow, whose unanticipated gift briefly succeeds in piercing Crocker-Harris’s reserve, in a scene that is a powerfully affecting highlight of the production. It can be watched on YouTube.




The Deep Blue Sea (BBC 1994, dir. Karel Reisz)

As Sir William Collyer, the unlucky Holm gets to play the cuckold again in Reisz's 1994 BBC teleplay of The Deep Blue Sea, delivering another excellent performance, one that doesn’t ask for - or inspire - much sympathy. As in The Browning Version, every shift of feeling and allegiance registers in Reisz’s production (which originated at the Almeida in 1993 and then transferred to the Apollo) and the standard of performance is extremely high. Penelope Wilton’s award-winning Hester is stunning; Wilton brings understated intensity (and a great deal of wit) to the role and powerfully conveys Hester’s emotional and sexual dependency upon Freddie. Her scenes with Holm (to whom she was really married at the time) combine tension with striking moments of complicity and connection that suggest a real history together. Colin Firth gives what I think is one of his finest-ever performances as Freddie, and there's distinguished supporting work from Stephen Tompkinson and Geraldine Sommerville as the Welches, Carmel McSharry as Mrs. Elton and Wojciech Pszoniak as Miller. Reisz truncates the crucial climactic encounter between Hester and Miller and slightly reduces the impact of the scene. But the production is compelling throughout, and comes to a graceful and moving end.

The humanity of Rattigan’s writing and the propensity of his work to give sympathetic voice to characters who are harshly judged or dismissed by others emerges strongly in all of these fine adaptations, each of which is well worth seeing. What’s slightly tormenting about the productions is that they’re a reminder of just how great British TV drama was, and how closely connected to theatre, not so very long ago.



Review: Cause Célèbre (Old Vic Theatre)

Thea Sharrock’s Olivier-honoured production of After the Dance at the National Theatre last year was one of the most acclaimed Terence Rattigan revivals in recent memory; it’s a production that I’m still kicking myself for missing. In the centenary of the playwright’s birth, Sharrock now takes on another lesser-known Rattigan text - this time the author's last play Cause Célèbre, in a production which had its first performance  at the Old Vic last Thursday. Written in 1976, the play takes as its focus a real-life 1930s murder case: the trial of Alma Rattenbury and her much younger chauffeur/lover Percy ‘George’ Wood for the killing of Alma’s elderly husband, Francis, who was found battered to death with a mallet. The trial caused a media and public storm, and elicited much moral outrage, not least because of the disparity in the lovers' ages. (Alma was 39; George 18.) Rattigan's play combines this incident with a fictional narrative concerning the forewoman of the jury at Alma’s trial, Edith Davenport. Edith is a moral stickler who’s divorcing her philandering husband and feels prejudiced towards Alma on grounds that go beyond the murder she may have committed.  As the trial progresses, however, Edith’s attitude to Alma gradually begins to change.

Sharrock’s swish production has many things going for it: it’s well-cast, and cleverly designed by Hildegard Bechtler, with some memorable details and a good sense of atmosphere. And yet as the evening progresses it’s hard to escape the feeling that something is missing, namely a sense of urgency and dramatic momentum. Despite the play's more salacious subject matter, the production never achieves the emotional hold of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Flare Path, and grips only fitfully. Part of the problem, I’d argue, lies with the play itself, which isn’t one of Rattigan’s strongest works. Structurally, the drama's leaps between past and present are intriguing but sometimes awkward, and certain key roles and relationships end up feeling under-developed. The result is that several good performers in Sharrock’s cast go to waste. In particular, I wanted to see much more of Jenny Galloway as Alma’s maid/companion, and Timothy Carlton who, as Alma’s husband, gets just one decent scene.

Of the main performers, Niamh Cusack, as Edith, is exceptional as always, and responsible for some of the production’s most emotionally affecting moments. Anne-Marie Duff is very good too, but, despite Rattigan’s evident sympathy for Alma as a victim of English sexual puritanism, the character remains something of an enigma to the end. As the sequence is staged here, Alma seems set on seducing George before she’s even clapped eyes on him, and Rattigan stints on scenes between the lovers that would give us a deeper sense of the development of their relationship - this despite the fact that the play's dialogue  is considerably franker in its treatment of sexual matters than much of his earlier work.

Of the other cast members, Tommy McDonnell is fine as George, but this role more than any other feels under-written and, while Rattigan appears to lavish sympathy upon Alma, there seems to be an element of class hostility in his presentation of this character. Nicholas Jones gets good comic mileage out of his role as the shrewd, slipper-wearing barrister who’s defending Alma and who isn’t adverse to bending the rules when he sees fit. And Freddie Fox is memorable as Edith’s son, a character every bit as randy as the one Fox played in the previous OV production, A Flea In Her Ear. (But minus the “comedy” speech impediment, thank God.) The principal problem, though, is that the play seems structured around a connection that isn’t really there. The parallels and contrasts between Alma and Edith’s predicaments that Rattigan develops feel rather strained and contrived, at least until the production’s very final moments which leave an impressively bitter and ironic sting.

Despite effective sequences, then, Sharrock's cool, controlled production doesn't achieve the kind of sustained intensity that we might expect from a Rattigan drama. It's a worthwhile evening overall, but if you’re opting for just one London Rattigan revival this Spring, then Flare Path remains the better bet.

The production runs for 2 hours 40 minutes. Further information at the Old Vic website.

Review: Flare Path (Theatre Royal Haymarket)

Trevor Nunn’s season as Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal Haymarket gets under way with a rather spiffing production of Terence Rattigan’s WWII drama Flare Path. The production is one of several Rattigan plays being staged across the UK to mark the centenary of the great playwright’s birth. The classic The Deep Blue Sea is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (and - even better - is also being filmed by Terence Davies; yes!) while Cause Celebre opens at the Old Vic later this month. First staged in London in 1942, in a production starring Phyllis Calvert, Flare Path isn’t one of Rattigan’s best known works, despite being adapted (and very much transformed) into the delightful film The Way to the Stars in 1945. There’s a sense, perhaps, that the play is too much of a museum piece, one that had something vital to communicate to 1940s audiences but has less to say to us today.

Entering the TRH auditorium to the appealing strains of 1940s ballads and swing music, it's immediately apparent that Nunn and his collaborators are taking a traditional and unironic approach to the material. This turns out to be a virtue, though. Rattigan’s play certainly has its flaws: it’s sometimes creaky in its exposition, schematic and often obvious. But Nunn’s confident production effortlessly draws you in, benefiting from the input of a crack ensemble cast and, ultimately, from the bracing humanity and compassion of a playwright who excels at getting his heroes and heroines into involving emotional binds. The following remarks were written after the first preview of the play on Friday 4th March.

Based in part on Rattigan’s own wartime experiences, the drama takes place in a hotel near an RAF Bomber Command airbase, and focuses upon the interactions of a variety of characters staying at the hotel. There’s Count Skriczevinsky (Mark Dexter), a Polish pilot serving with the RAF and his young English wife Doris (Sheridan Smith); the tail gunner Dusty Miller (Joe Armstrong) and his wife Maudie (Emma Handy) who’s arrived for a short visit; and, most centrally, there’s the love triangle being played out between three characters: the genial, unwitting Flight Lt. Teddy Graham (Harry Hadden-Paton), his actress wife Patricia (Sienna Miller) and her film star lover Peter Kyle (James Purefoy), whose unexpected arrival at the hotel is intended to encourage Patricia into leaving Teddy. Matters come to a head when the men are sent on a night-time raid over Germany from which it seems unlikely that all will return.

Stephen Brimson Lewis's attractive set nicely evokes the hotel lobby/reception area in which all of the action occurs, with nifty projections by Jack James and an understated sound design by Paul Groothius effectively conveying the airfield outside, especially in a pivotal take-off scene. Indeed, the production conjures its place and time with consummate skill, and despite a few longueurs over its 2 hour 45 minute running time, it’s mostly satisfyingly paced, moving through contrasting moods with, dare we say, Chekhovian aplomb. It's often very funny (though perhaps a little too insistent in wringing laughs out of the faltering English of Dexter’s Polish Count), and at times very moving too. Rattigan’s writing is especially good at exploring the dynamics between the RAF and non-RAF characters, and, in particular, their delight at the appearance of a Hollywood star in their midst: there’s a nice running gag about Peter being asked about his acquaintanceship with a variety of film stars.

The reference to Chekhov also feels apt because Flare Path is very much an ensemble piece. Every character, no matter how minor, counts, and, as often, Nunn succeeds at getting his cast to spark off each other in a lively and natural fashion. This is the kind of play in which you come to care more and more about the characters the more you learn about them. Rattigan is often praised as a great writer for women but his male protaginists are drawn with equal insight and the two principal actors here could hardly be bettered. Purefoy is expert as he suggests the doubts and insecurities lurking under the surface of his matinee idol's polished persona, while Harry Hadden-Paton is stunning  as Teddy, stripping away the character’s good-humoured charm in a deeply affecting scene in which his vulnerability and emotional dependency upon Patricia are revealed. In such scenes, Rattigan's writing pierces through the stiff-upper-lippery to create moments of intense poignancy and power.

If there’s a weaker element to the ensemble I’m afraid to report that it’s Sienna Miller. Her performance is adequate, but doesn’t succeed  - yet - in communicating the depths of Patricia’s predicament or in making the most of the massive transition that the character undergoes. Nor do her scenes with Purefoy really crackle; the love story seems somewhat underplayed. At times you almost forget that she’s there: Teddy and Peter might be competing over a void. Miller's lack of presence seems particularly noticeable, perhaps, because the other actors register so vividly. The wonderful Sheridan Smith brings a marvellous warmth and humour to her barmaid-turned-Countess, and her late scene with Purefoy (it involves the translation of a significant letter) is a heartbreaker. Emma Handy is a brilliant mixture of querulousness and stoicism as Maudie, Joe Armstrong is quite delightful as Dusty, and Clive Wood spot-on as the squadron leader Swanson. And as the fussy hotel proprietress Sarah Crowden delivers an absolute gem of a comic performance that channels Joyce Carey by way of Maggie Smith.

In its sentimental endorsement of the necessity of putting aside personal passions for the good of the war effort, there’s no denying that Flare Path is a museum piece in many ways. And yet Nunn’s production feels fresher than you might expect. The play’s “relevance,” I’d argue, lies in making a case for values that have precious little currency in our contemporary culture: self-denial, emotional restraint, duty to the group. Intelligent, assured and full of feeling, this generous-spirited production is a real pleasure, and probably as accomplished a staging of the play as you could ever hope to see.

 

The production runs for 2 hrs 45 minutes. It's booking until 4th June. Further information here.