In 1954, Terence Rattigan dominated the English stage, yet within a couple of years, aspiring directors were filing his plays away in the basement archive, shoved aside by those of angry young men like John Osborne and Arnold Wesker.
The new breed were outspoken, breaking the old taboos; Rattigan was about reticence and the inability to break them. And this wonderful brace of his one-act plays, Table Number Seven and The Browning Version, perfectly capture that moment when the old order started to give way.
At that time, homosexual acts were still a crime and the Lord Chancellor still retained the power to censor plays, so Rattigan, a homosexual, had to change the nature of the offence of his fake Major Pollock in the former play from one of soliciting men to picking up female prostitutes. This production naturally restores his original intention.
It does not present the same challenge to middle class morality as it did 70 years ago. No-one is likely to sympathise with these Disgusteds of the Bournemouth boarding house, but its voice for toleration is undiminished.
Nathaniel Parker gives a fine performance as the lonely, self-deceiving, pathetic ‘Major’ and a tremendous one in the second play as the crusty Classics master, Crocker-Harris. Parker spins the lines with the timing of a master musician, and while the effect of a little kindness—the gift of Browning’s translation of his beloved Aeschylus—made the Croc blub, it brought a little water to my eyes too.
It is a measure of Rattigan’s genius that he endows such complexity to the character of Crocker-Harris’s unforgiving, cruel wife Millie, aptly played with alarming forcefulness by Lolita Chakrabati.
In Table Number Seven, the role of the Major’s prurient, prejudiced nemesis, Mrs Railton-Bell, is played with remarkable vigour by the 91-year-old Sian Phillips, whose jaw drops a couple of inches with masochistic pleasure on reading about his misdemeanour in the local paper. It has to be said, however, that she is too old for the part of this mother of daughter Sybil, a winsome Alexandra Dowling, seemingly a young woman more likely to be her granddaughter.