Terence Rattigan was expert at showing the feeling hidden behind British reticence, but in this 1973 play, it takes a long time to see past the obnoxious behaviour of book critic Sebastian Cruttwell.
Unable to sustain his early success as a novelist, he has a successful career assessing others for a posh Sunday paper. He claims to be a Marxist but behaves like a mandarin. He treats people like lackeys, especially his wife Lydia. They met in Berlin at the end of the war when he was an intelligence officer and she was an Estonian refugee made stateless whom he married to give her a British identity.
There is a gruesomely dramatic backstory of how Lydia escaped Nazi execution, but the current situation concerns the concealment of truth by both of them. As a result of childhood malnutrition, Lydia now has a terminal illness which she hides from her husband. It would be a spoiler to tell you what he is hiding. He isn’t as awful as he appears to be, though Dominic Rowan makes him seem an egotistic monster expecting others to do everything for him, too grand to even pour his own whisky. He is jealous of American friend Mark Walters, who churns out money-making best-sellers, and contemptuous of his son Joey’s support of the Liberals in an election.
Claire Price’s elegant, lightly-accented Lydia takes her husband’s demands in her stride. It’s more efficient and she’s in control, though when she plans a fake phone call, she can’t get away with it.
Joey (Joe Edgar) is an aspiring writer with a TV play accepted by the BBC. He looks for support and affection from his father, but they are missing: dad is too tied up with himself. Young Joey is a stickler for telling the truth, but his mother advises that sometimes you should lie to those you love.
Despite their abrasive exchanges, there is a lot of love of different kinds that links these people together. Lydia is clearly full of caring love and feeling a different kind of affection for Mark. He, Daniel Abelson’s performance subtly suggests, may be attracted to both Lydia and Sebastian. Sebastian remarks on the way his feelings have changed, and Joey, well perhaps things are different for him too by the time the play ends,
Amelia Sears concentrates attention on the actors, her direction successfully unobtrusive, though Peter Butler’s design tries too hard to make a point with shelves of books on the balcony fronts and high up in the ceiling, every volume white and untitled. They are surreal, and symbolic I suppose of people’s inscrutable façade, but they are unnecessary, but the choice of television set is spot-on for this literary household.
This production will also be streamed online 8–11 July.