WICKED ECHOES FROM ANOTHER DEPRESSION
Well, here’s something oddly familiar! A legendary international financier with charm, vast wealth, grubby fingers in many pies and a charitable foundation to distract attention and draw influence. He’s an alpha-male predator, likes being on the cutting edge of tech, and prudently keeps a proud “dossier” about the weaknesses of numberless people of significance . His name gets the phone answered by every head of state in Europe and the US (“With Stalin I can do business. With Ramsay Macdonald, no”.) And critically , not only is he a gleeful pirate of finance and cracks deals with Mussolini and Goering and that ‘nasty little guttersnipe Hitler) but he has absolutely no scruples at all where sex and its uses are concerned.
Perfect, after days of Epsteinery: plays take time to programme ,cast and rehearse so there’s somethiing exhilarating when by serendipity launch night comes slap-bang in the middle of an overheated news cycle. Especially piquant if it happens to be a revival of a little-known late Terence Rattigan play from 1963, set in the Depression of 1934.
So here we are, being darkly delighted by Ben Daniels playing Gregor Antonescu as a human volcano of charm, aggression, danger and dominance. Daniels is breathtaking, almost crazedly, physical: Anthony Lau’s violent direction in Georgia `Lowe’s starkly simple set has him – and several others – leaping on and off tables, confronting and looming , sometimes using his whole long angular body and battered, brutal face to express, fascinate, dominate. When he isn’t practising his powers on other characters they tellingly often remain onstage, frozen or prone. He is everything. Until, as his alienated son screams at him on understanding his amoral emptiness “you are nothing!”
It’s that son, Laurie Kynaston as Vassily – now calling himself Basil Anthony – who we meet first. He’s in a Greenwich village basement eking a living playing bar piano and in love with an aspiring actress Carol. We learn that five years ago he walked out on his father in socialist disgust and personal contempt, involving a gunshot. Though as the father scornfully points out , “a bullet in the chandelier six feet over my head” isn’t much of a parricide attempt.
Amtonescu is the fabulous focus of this energetic, noir play: a Hungarian-born tycoon whose empire is about to collapse and crash international finance, because accountants in a potential merger spotted that his real liquidity absolutely does not justify his overweening confidence (he delivers a lovely brief lecture on those two essentials of speculative capitalism). His shares are tumbling. So – for a wickedly dark reason scholars of Rattigan know but I will not spoil (we gasped) – he decided to use his son’s basement digs for a last-chance meeting with Herries, chairman of the potential merger, and his accountant. They too are wonderful casting and subtle performances: Malcolm Sinclair senatorial, respectable and in control until Antonescu neatly suborns him, and Leo Wan gloriously offended as the accountant, brandishing all the facts of the financier’s con-trick on six metres of rolled out paper , but gradually losing the battle. As the first half ends and Daniels does all but dance a fandango on the table, it looks like another Antonescu miracle escape. For as he often says “ in finance man makes his own miracles”.
That first half is wonderful wicked entertainment, though it then becomes true Rattigan in its undertow of real sad, odd, wistful emotional truth: Vassily is his father’s opposite, still the “little boy who was scared of horses and wouldn’t learn how to swim”.But the magnetism of his father draws him back as the old monster’s fortunes abruptly crack. And we are drawn too, despite the truly appalling thing we just watched Antonescu do in the first half. He is after all a tragedy: he had his chances to love and be loved – Isabella Laughland as his second wife appears swathed in leopardskin in the second half – but has not been able to bear the danger of such emotions.Not from her, not from his boy. Brilliant corruption made him hollow.
But goodness, you can’t take your eyes off Ben Daniels. The final scene – still no spoilers – is wonderful, disgracefully funny, a last deal struck between the financier and his efficient henchman Sven ( that’s another great performance, Nick Fletcher as a grey suit with a steel core of self-preservation).
It’s good to have Rattigan valued again, with many revivals of classics from his heyday like The Deep Blue Sea and Flare Path. But even better to see this – from the period in his fifties when his star had faded and the angry-young-men thought him dated. It’s a treat.
Box office nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 14 March
rating. 5
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