DROWNING PASSION, TIMELESS RESCUE
Marvellous play, this: wrenches the heart out of you , patches it up and sets it back on the hard road of life and love. It wrenched Terence Rattigan himself, close to a loss of his own: the first thing he said after learning his own terrible news was to conceive of a play starting “with the body discovered dead in front of a gas fire”.
So it does, though its greatness lies in Hester’s recovery – she forgot to put a shilling in the gas-meter – and the unfolding depiction of her disastrous passion and crumbling despair. The late moments , when Miller the struck-off doctor saves her once more with bruising, healing truth, are some of the finest in all theatre. When actors can lead you through such a reality without exaggeration or hamming, it is an emotional event important in almost any life.
So it’s a play that needs the best; director Lindsay Posner treats it with proper respect, in a note-perfect, seedy wallpaper-crumbling 1930s flat, and the casting is perfect, from the first arrival of the naive young couple (tremulous Lisa Ambalavanar and nervously dutiful Preston Nyman) with Selina Cadell’s landlady, we are there in that rooming-house world with its rent anxieties and respectability, soon aware that “Mrs Page” is no such thing, but Lady Collyer, runaway wife of a judge. And that her lover Freddie is no good for her. Every character thereafter hits the right note dead-on: Finbar Lynch’s dourly wise Miller, Nicholas Farrell’s wounded, hopeful Judge, and eventually Hadley Fraser’s jaunty, defensive Freddie with his golf-clubs, letting off steam tipsily to his pal Jackie (Marc Elliott) about how forgetting a woman’s birthday isn’t such a crime and how awful it is to get “tangled up in people’s emotions” and need to flee.
They’re all perfect. And of course at their centre is Hester herself: Tamsin Greig. I worried at first, in the low-key early scenes with Miller, the judge and Freddie himself, that she was far too quiet, dangerously near-inaudible sometimes, as if giving more of a subtle screen than big-theatre stage performance. But in effect her presence, power and judgement outweighed that and the problem improved: I doubt anybody missed anything, and her emotional truth – and indeed comic timing at times – overwhelmed any misgivings.
She gives us a woman in early mid-life, perhaps too much protected by respectability for too long, her very paintings on the wall too timid but with dignity, irony and sometimes even a dark wit about her own helpless need for awful Freddie . But her very qualities of self-awareness put her at risk as she crumbles into despising what she is and what she has done with her life. In the second half her encounters with a series of men – including the judge’s unwise “don’t you realize what I’m offering?”, the wonderful, dry wit of her dealings with Philip and her terrible pleading with Freddie – are breathtaking in their truthful, mundane depth. And Freddie too takes the fearful step into honesty with a famous line, which could be terrible but somehow isn’t: “We’re death to each other, you and I”.
Rattigan also never fails to offer us, just casually on the side, some other line that sticks. This time it’s Mrs Elton as the landlady who gets to reflect, as she bustles out, “Strange how one always seems to prefer nice people to good people” .
trh.co.uk. to 21 June
Rating 4
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