Old Vic, London
Somewhat coolly received at its premiere in 1977, Terence Rattigan's final play stands the test of time.
And, watching Thea Sharrock's fine revival, I was struck by how many classic Rattigan themes the play encapsulates: the inequality of passion, the power of youth over age and the corrosive effects of English sexual puritanism. Rattigan may have been a master of understatement, but he deplored emotional repression.
The play is based on a characteristic Rattigan antithesis. On the one hand, it's the real-life story of Alma Rattenbury who in 1935 was tried, alongside her teenage lover, for the murder of her husband. On the other hand, it's also the story of a fictional juror, Edith Davenport, who is seeking a divorce from her errant husband and who is the polar opposite of the fun-loving, passionate Alma. Rattigan reinforces the point by contrasting Alma's brash, self-confident lover, George, with Edith's sexually diffident son who is the same age but driven to seek worldly experience with a prostitute.
Occasionally Rattigan's love of structural neatness is over-insistent. But the play leaves you in no doubt as to what Rattigan views as the real "vice Anglais". He suggests Edith's denial of life drives her husband into infidelity and almost ruins her son. Alma's belief that "this is a lovely world and we're put in it to enjoy it" may cause its own havoc and land her unjustly in the dock but is, Rattigan implies, a better philosophy to live by.
But this is a play about class as well as sex: I had forgotten how subtly Rattigan suggests the opposing counsels inhabit the same masonic clubman's world while the accused, however innocent of the charge, is branded a corrupter of youth and a vulgar sensualist.
Admittedly Anne-Marie Duff is not obvious casting as the happily hedonistic Alma. But she invests the role with a fragile intensity as if she is experiencing a bad dream, and has one wonderful moment when her eyes gaze adoringly at her young son who has been strategically placed in the courtroom. Meanwhile Niamh Cusack as Edith radiates the right conjugal frostiness until her belated conversion. And there is good work from Nicholas Jones as Alma's silky but patronising counsel and Simon Chandler as Edith's bereft husband.
I was not moved to tears as in Flare Path. But there is an emotionally draining moment when we see a high-court judge donning the black triangle that signifies a sentence of death. And behind the play one senses the compassionate understanding for the outcast that was always Rattigan's trump card as a dramatist.