WHY RATTIGAN COUNTS
Quite a rare outing for this very late Terence Rattigan play, written after his star had fallen under the assault of mouthy Osborne, Amis and the “angry young men” who dismissed him as lightweight middleclass entertainment, irrelevant to the horrors and rages of a troubled world. . Which was never really fair, and seems ever less so given this play’s striking last scenes in which a husband lays out, mercilessly, his horrified compassion at the experinces of his Estonian refugee wife. Puts Jimmy Porter’s misogynistic whining in its place.
It begins as drawing-room domestic comedy with a 1960’s political edge: tetchy Sebastian the literary critic (Dominic Rowan) is a fellow-traveller Marxist leftie intellectual , grumbling at his patient wife Lydia and badmouthing their friend Mark, a glitzy American bestselling novelist who holds a candle for her. Equal contumely falls on any mention of their son Joey, a nicely vigorous Joe Edgar, for joining the Liberal party – “vote splitters!” cries his father. But Joey has had a play bought for BBC2 , and tomorrow the four must all watch together (ah, the dear dead days of appointment-to-view TV!).
There are secrets unevenly shared, in a inspired by the marriage of Rex Harrison who concealed his terror for a sick wife under breezy grumpiness towards her. Lydia proudly shows Sebastian a reassuring report from her doctor, but confides the truth to Mark: thanks to her cunning wartime ability to read documents upside down in a hurry, she knows perfectly well that she is dying, just doesnt want Sebastian to know or worry. She is even artfully encouraging his affair with another woman, her probable replacement. Claire Price, doing justice to one of the most gruellingluy talkative of roles, gives Lydia an authentic steely edge: here’s an determined, emotionally generous survivor realist, prattling, excoriating bad vodka, putting up with Sebastian’s fuss goodhumouredly, but opening up safely to faithful Mark about love before ideas, people before “things”.
Her longing for her husband and son to become close is touching, reaching a peak later; but the confident young adult enrages his Dad over politics every time they meet, having shrewdly observed that there’s something very old-imperial Tory about his uncompromising send-in-the tanks Stalinism. There are two significant chess games.
Emotional melodrama erupts in the second half, as Sebastian misses the TV show – we get a glimpse of its dour political youth-anger on a nicely period b&w telly – and disaster befalls Lydia’s attempt to cover up his dereliction. But then, as the two older men confront one another, Rattigan’s play takes its powerful swerve. We may have long suspected that Sebastian secretly knows about Lydia’s awful prognosis and is, in parallel, trying to spare her . Because for all his clenched British reluctance to show emotion he knows every detail of her story of being “untermensch”, herded to mass graves by the Nazis and then traded sexually by the Russians. Death had been too close too long and now, crazily misunderstanding her strength, he thinks he can hide the bad medical news from her..
There’s a wonderful unspoken parallel between the general, timeless British avoidance of emotion – which Lydia had earlier decried – and the way that for decade, indeed during my childhood and teens, despite awareness of the Jewish Holocause little of WW2’s other atrocity was ever spoken of . It was, after all, only fifteen years since the Allies sold out the Poles and Balts at Yalta.
But here’s good old Rattigan reminding a generation, while all Jimmy Porter could manage is bullying his wife and throwing a permanent class-war tantrum
Orangetreetheatre.co.uk. To 5 July
rating 4
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