Royal and Derngate, Northampton
I brusquely dismissed Terence Rattigan's play when it opened in 1973 accompanied by a clunky curtain-raiser: I even have a copy of the play inscribed to me by the author, who adds, "God knows, you don't deserve it." But I'm happy, after all these years, to make amends. And, watching Richard Beecham's fine revival, it struck me that the play expresses the quintessential Rattigan paradox. It explicitly attacks English emotional reticence, yet its overwhelming impact depends precisely on avoidance of confrontation.
Its hero, Sebastian Cruttwell, is a bit of an anachronism: a Marxist literary critic on a posh Sunday paper. But Sebastian also seems a self-regarding shit who keeps the world at bay with his aggressively mocking banter. You see this in his relationship with his wife, Lydia, a former Estonian refugee suffering from a terminal illness. If Sebastian is tetchy with Lydia, he is openly abusive to his friend Mark, an enviably bestselling American novelist, and to his son, Joey, who offends him by working for the Liberal party: "A vote-splitting organisation," says Sebastian, "carefully designed to keep the establishment in power."
You may quibble at the way Sebastian, knowing Lydia's background, seems indifferent to Soviet imperialism, and, for a dramatist of Rattigan's skill, there is excessive dependence on confidential papers hidden in a hatbox. But the play moves you deeply because Rattigan puts so much of himself into it: not least into the anguished father-son relationship echoing that of the author and his diplomat dad. Above all, the play demonstrates the theatrical power of self-denial. Rattigan gives Sebastian a crucial speech in which he defines the English vice not as flagellation or pederasty but "our refusal to admit to our emotions". Rattigan's masterstroke is to show that the husband and wife can confess their passion more easily to other people than to each other.
It greatly helps that Naomi Dawson's set boasts the most convincing book-lined flat I've seen on the British stage. Jay Villiers has exactly the right blustering self-importance as the literary critic who, as Malcolm Muggeridge once said of Cyril Connolly, is too big for his books. As Lydia, Geraldine Alexander at times puts Baltic authenticity above comprehensibility but charts the character's physical decline with astonishing precision. And Sean Power as the best friend, who as an American is unashamed of his love for Lydia, and Gethin Anthony as the hero's emotionally estranged son are first-rate. If I failed to see the virtues of the play first time round, it was because of my own myopia and the tenor of the times. Now this looks like a play in which Rattigan came as close as he ever did to exposing his own emotional defensiveness.