Review Love In Idleness [Preview]

  
Francis Beckett takes issue with the late Terence Rattigan's examination of post Second World War society, but takes pleasure in a splendid cast.

 Love in Idleness
by Terence Rattigan
Adapted by Sir Trevor Nunn

The Times They Were (And Are) A Changin'  
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/apollo-theatre/love_in_idleness

It’s a sign of reactionary times when we hear a lot about how the great Terence Rattigan was unjustly cast into the outer darkness by the emergence of the radical playwrights of the late 1950s – John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and the rest. As David Hare once put it, “in rightwing times, rightwing art flourishes.”

Trevor Nunn, who directs Love in Idleness, writes in the theatre programme: “Kenneth Tynan’s excitement at seeing John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 was understandable, but then his constant rejection and derision of Rattigan, in favour of ‘angry young man’ plays, was a mistake.”

David Hare nailed this rubbish as long ago as 2011, writing: “It has become a commonplace of commentary to turn him [Rattigan] into some sort of public school victim whose fall from grace can be put down to nasty goings-on initiated by yobs at the Royal Court and Stratford East in the 1950s.”

The truth is that the new playwrights spoke to the generation of the Attlee settlement. Rattigan didn’t.  That’s not to deny that Rattigan at his best was a thoroughly accomplished and, in his own way, rather radical playwright.

The play now at the Apollo Theatre, after a run at the Menier Chocolate Factory, is a composite. He wrote a play called Less Than Kind in 1944, then altered it at the behest of the famous acting duo Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt and renamed it Love in Idleness.  Years later he regretted this, and  Nunn has now reworked the two plays into one.

If Nunn is right – and I have no reason to doubt it  – to suppose that this play is at least something approaching the work Rattigan would have produced if left to himself, what it tells us is that the playwright was on the wrong side of history.
 
Written and produced as the Second World War ground to an end, it addresses, as every writer worth his salt was addressing at that time, the sort of post war world that was going to emerge. 

But while some writers were looking forward to a new and better world, Rattigan, on the evidence of Love in Idleness, was looking forward to business as usual; to a return to the status quo ante, when the rich knew how things should be done, and the poor knew their place. 

He thought the Beveridge Report was so much froth, and the new world that the Labour Party dreamed of creating would turn out to be, as one of his characters puts it, “the same as the old world but spring cleaned a little.”

He was wrong. Between 1945 and 1948 the Attlee government carried out the only real social revolution Britain has ever seen, and Beveridge provided their blueprint.

If Rattigan felt like sneering at it – and he did – that places him in the sad harrumphing old tradition of William Douglas-Home, who wrote a very successful and entirely vacuous play, later a film, around the same time called The Chiltern Hundreds, about a butler who stands for the Conservative Party and defeats the uppity socialist.  (Message: the working class salt of the earth know their place.)

In Love in Idleness, Sir John Fletcher, a rather conservative (with both a small and capital c), Canadian businessman, has been drafted into Winston Churchill’s war cabinet as Minister of Tank Production. 

Presumably Rattigan had in mind the Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, whom Churchill appointed as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940. Yet this is odd because he paints Fletcher as a terribly decent chap, and Beaverbrook was a shit.  

Sir John has parted from his much younger wife, whom we are encouraged to assume is a gold-digger, and is living with the widow of a dentist, whose son is serving with the army in Canada. 

But when the son comes home, he is distressed by this arrangement – both because it makes his mother a kept woman, and because he disapproves of Fletcher’s right wing politics. 

None of the characters rang true to me. Sir John is a wise and kindly multi-millionaire; his widowed lover, Oliva Brown, a charming, rather dippy social climber; and her son Michael a selfish and self-absorbed 18-year-old who has adopted some foolish ideas about making a better world which we are encouraged to hope that he will grow out of soon.

They are played with matchless professionalism and conviction, Sir John by Anthony Head, Olivia by Eve Best and Michael by Edward Bluemel, but nothing these fine actors can do, and nothing Sir Trevor's assured direction can do, will make them anything other than unbelievable standard-bearers of a complacent and reactionary political point.

Nonetheless, it is always a pleasure to watch such very good actors at the top of their form in a well plotted play, so I’m happy to give it an amber light.

Review The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea

By Terence Rattigan

Aftermath

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

When we say "post war" now, it really feels as if we have to define which war we're talking about. For Terence Rattigan, son of a diplomat,  an Oxford-educated history graduate and ex-RAF, there was no such ambiguity in 1952. Everybody in the western world, and some beyond, knew what it was like to be "post war".

So The Deep Blue Sea is very definitely a post Second World War play - post Battle of Britain, post the revealing to the British public of concentration camp horrors, post the judgements of the Nuremberg Trials, and, even if in the very near past, post British Empire in an austere and much depleted United Kingdom.  

Helen McCrory is Hester Collyer, who has run away from her High Court judge husband, Sir William (Peter Sullivan).  Having fled from Eaton Square, she now lives an exile from society  yet a near neighbour, apparently unknown to him, of her estranged husband, as "Mrs Page", in a Ladbroke Grove bedsit with her ex RAF lover. Freddie (Tom Burke) has struggled to make a living as a post-war test pilot, both in Canada and the UK, although he still manages somehow to pay for his rounds of drink and golf weekends at Sunningdale.

The play starts with Hester's botched attempt at suicide from an overdose and gas asphyxiation - botched because the shilling in the gas meter runs out.  She's found the following morning by fellow tenants,  Home Office employees Philip Welch (Hubert Burton) and his pregnant wife Ann (Yolanda Kettle)  -  obviously no surname pun intended  -  and her solicitous gossip of a landlady Mrs Eldon (Marion Bailey),  They call in bookie's clerk and German ex Prisoner of War Kurt Miller (Nick Fletcher) who appears to have more than a smattering of medical knowledge. 

This is an engrossing, detailed production directed by Carrie Cracknell, if somewhat held up at times by lengthy sound effects splaying like confused radio frequencies (sound: Peter Rice). At the centre is a desperate yet clear-sighted Hester, known as Hes to her husband of which more later, at the centre of the action and all the other characters swirling around her, in their various ways keeping her at arm's length. 

The bedsit, in a multi-storied set designed by Tom Scutt, filled with the shadows of adjacent tenants' rooms,  feels surreally stretched out, bathed in grayish green light. (lighting: Guy Hoare). McCrory's cut glass Hester is transfixing, with a film star glow amidst her dull surroundings. She's a conquest creating a problem which  Freddie (a dissolute with a survival instinct in Burke's equally fine performance) and his friend Jackie (Adetomiwa Edun)  realize he cannot possibly handle..  

There's little doubt that, in part, The Deep Blue Sea was inspired by the suicide of Rattigan's male lover, actor Kenny Morgan and TLT with her sporty little hatchback went in with this commonly held knowledge. But as they watched the play another uncomfortable, more than spikey parallel emerged. 

Phoned up by the Home Office couple, the judge calls Hester by the shortened nicknamed "Hes". Hes becomes more and more isolated while even her own estranged husband comforts her but seems to have no inclination to bring her back to legitimate society where he can count the Solicitor General as an old friend and entertains American judges. 

The Home Office couple are, like the landlady, solicitous but also rather thrilled by the knowledge they now have about a High Court Judge. Albeit the implications of the publiic coroner's court enquiry,  if Hester had succeeded in her attempt,  are not lost on them. 

It is Miller, as much an outcast as a struck off Nazi scientist and German  mprisoned by the Allies as an outcast as a homosexual, the latter a common interpretation of his role,  who can talk Hester out of her aggrieved attempts at suicide. The question of judgements and justice raised by the post-war Nuremberg Trials and a lifetime's limbo of life imprisonment, as in the case of Rudolf Hess, caught between those who were hanged and those imprisoned and released spoke out loud and clear to us from this production. 

This was the first production of The Deep Blue Sea we have seen with fine performances and a stunning Hester at its centre, a heroine who knows her life is descending into cheap melodrama while others can turn the page and move on. Written after the turmoil in Europe and Asia of World War II, it also, it seems to us, is a seamlessly integrated nuanced dramatic debate without attempting a glib resolution. 

But many others can judge for themselves when it is broadcast in British cinemas on September 1 and internationally on October 6. In the meantime, it's a green light from TLT and her little jalopy.

Review French Without Tears

French Without Tears

By Terence Rattigan

Entente Non Cordiale

https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/french-without-tears

A group of young gentlemen gather in Villa Miramar in France to learn French for the diplomatic corps entry exams. Coming from a line of toffs himself with a diplomat father and once earmarked for the same career, playwright Terence Rattigan was obviously writing, to cite an old adage "what he knew" in 1936.

And that year was a rum old twelve months for diplomacy.  George V died to be succeeded by Edward VIII who within a few months had abdicated in favour of his brother. Stalinist purges swept the Soviet Union.  France elected a left-wing government.  The Spanish army of Africa rose up against the left wing Spanish Republican government,  Syria gained partial independence from France,  the Italian army marched into Ethiopa,  Japan and Germany signed an anti-communist pact  and  National Socialist Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. 

Still Billy Butlin started his first holiday camp.

And aged 25, Rattigan scored his first theatre success, inspired by his own experiences at a German crammer, after honing an economic  writing technique penning dialogue for quota quickies at Teddington Studios. Luckily for us, this  Hi-De-Hi boarding house school for toffs, distracted by the fairer sex, channels the more frivolous side of this era in a delicious production directed by Paul Miller at the Orange Tree Theatre.

And my God, doe-eyed Diana (Genevieve Gaunt) , an English rose cum Hollywood femme fatale, does cause havoc at the crammer college of M. Maingot (David Whitworth).  As she exercises her own seductive divide-and-rule ruses,  the men tumble for her like diplomats unable to resist the most powerful she-nation.  

Ambassador's son Hon Alan Howard (Alex Bhat), already fluent in French, destined by family for the diplomatic service but a novelist and pacifist by inclination, becomes increasingly embittered. Stoked by Diana, his relations with the more sentimental Kit Neilan (Joe Eyre) and bluff Royal Navy man Commander Bill Rogers (William Belchambers) also become more than strained, eventually coming to blows.

Meanwhile the demure tutor, Jacqueline (Sarah Winter), daughter of the proprietor,  and Kenneth (Patrick MacNamee), Diana's cadet brother, are also victims of unrequited affections. Indeed, apart from M. Maingot and the maid Marianne (perfectly French Laila Alj), only hearty Englishman Brian Curtis (Tom Hanson), with sterling qualities and sex not love on the brain, keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs.  

Like all the best farces, this has more serious undercurrents. Claws lurk beneath the cut glass accents, cod French (anyone else remember Punch's Let's Parler Franglais?), irregular verbs and present definitely tense as Bastille Day arrives with carnival celebrations at the local casino.

Genevieve Gaunt's timing (and claws) as predatory Diana are spot on, raising the temperature and laughs backed by - what else but - French windows.  The sparsely-furnished yet expressive set, from Simon Daw, suits the performance space topped by blackboards fronting the balcony chalked with French exercises.  

The costumes  are satisfyingly recognizable types while the transitions are pleasingly lit by Mark Doubleday to pass time on the in-the-round stage with music by David Shrubsole.   

The male characters all make their mark and throw out their own point of view: Alex Bhat as Alan, seemingly in control but with demagogic tendancies and increasingly frantic behind his copy of Le Monde while Joe Eyre's Kit has an underlying vulnerability; Tom Hanson makes barrel-chested Brian,  for whom it is almost always business as usual, stride through the wreckage; William Belchambers convincingly turns from love struck suitor to bodyguard, while Patrick McNamee embodies nervy Kenneth.

David Whitworth cuts an appropriately professorial figure, donning his Carnival fancy dress with aplomb. Delicate Sarah Winter is  sweetly besotted as daughter "Jack" (from Jacqueline rather than Frère Jacques) who by the end shows her own claws in a Oscar-Wilde-like scene with Diana. Even with sometimes slightly dodgy French accents, there is a charm as the farce unravels.  

Ah yes, and TLT had no idea until her trip to the West Coast of France via the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond that Mr Rattigan had already bagged the red, amber and green light idea as his own in French Without Tears. Listen out for it in the second act! :)

While this may seem like a frothy piece of almost-juvenilia, Rattigan himself was at pains to point out it dealt with matters close to the heart of the young idealistic 1930s' playwright. This production has a pleasing clarity working on many levels with at least two young children in the audience enjoying the farce element of the show as much as the adults. A green light from TLT and her bagnole, but not quite as Rattigan meant it in his play!

Review The Winslow Boy

The Winslow Boy
 By Terence Rattigan
The Old Vic, SE1

Is Right Ever Really Done? -  Rattigan's Tangled Web

It was generally thought to be very strange that a notoriously insincere farceur could so readily turn his hand to matters of fairly serious theatrical moment ..."  The playwright quoted in Terence Rattigan by Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson.

TLT and her shiny metal aide de camp went to an early Old Vic preview of Rattigan's evergreen 1946 The Winslow Boy, the five-shilling-stolen-postal-order drama. However, at the time we desisted from writing a review of a rather plodding production with the best performances coming from Henry Goodman as pa (Arthur) Winslow, Deborah Findlay as ma (Grace) Winslow and Nick Hendrix as the alleged culprit's brother, Dickie.

What is seemed to miss was the febrile pace of the early years of the twentieth century with Britain on the cusp of introducing universal social insurance, changing subjects to citizens. Also the atmosphere of 1946, with Churchill and the Conservatives defeated, ushering in a new government and a welfare state dependent on American loans.

So this is a rather different review and, hopefully, a thoughtful piece, giving some context to a fine play. Bear with us as we start the engine, build up speed and rev into action! :)

Just to nudge you along the highway, the original old age pension, introduced in the significant year of 1908, paid tellingly mostly to elderly single women, via local post offices was, guess what - five shillings.

The Winslow Boy was inspired by a true-life 1908 post office scandal, which went global, of 14-year-old Royal Naval cadet George Archer-Shee, renamed in the play Ronnie Winslow (acted by Charlie Rowe this time at the Old Vic). Rattigan moved to 1912, after the resolution of the real case in 1911, which was also the year of the first National Insurance Act and Rattigan's birth.

It seems the authorities at the Royal Naval College, Osborne pretended that cadets' parents did not exist but allowed postal orders to be sent direct to cadets rather than to the College and then paid out.

Despite one cadet alleging theft against George Archer-Shee (or whatever else was going on amongst the male cadets), the case did not involve the police and police courts. It was left as an internal affair with the verdict of the internal enquiry protected by Crown immunity.

Perhaps it's worth noting that the character of barrister Sir Robert Morton was based on Sir Edward Carson who represented the Marquess of Queensbury, cross-examining Oscar Wilde at the notorious "somdomite" libel trial. 

In The Winslow Boy, with the help of journalists competing for a human interest story and women readers, the silk Sir Robert Morton (Peter Sullivan, played at the 1946 première by Emlyn Williams, writer of Accolade) proves adept at disguising that Ronnie and family de facto citizens under social insurance, not subjects under the Crown.

Instead he promotes the role of the Crown, petition of right, the play-acting of civil courts with their legal advertisements and presents and Her Majesty's Parliament, already rendered obsolete before the Crown Proceedings 1947 legislation, catching citizens in its Kafkaesque Crown and court web from a bygone age of subjects.

In this context, "Let Right Be Done!", far from a sincere plea for civil liberty, becomes a much more slyly ambiguous expression of deceptive right-wing politics, glib soundbite, "costs" for legal theatricals and the manipulation of a vulnerable family and a gullible newspaper-reading public.

Anyway, in our view, the character of barrister Sir Robert is a Janus-faced chancer of a politician, putting the family unnecessarily through the emotional and, more importantly, financial wringer (pocketing fees and helping legal chums pocket the court costs), manipulating public opinion with contract law rendered a sham by the introduction of social insurance.

In fact, he fulfils the bitter words about him early in the play, voiced by Ronnie's rather Left-wing suffragette sister Catherine (Naomi Frederick), herself a single woman who, by the end of the play, may well be destined for a spinster old-age-five-shilling pension, directly as a result of her family pursuing the case. Unless she, as one of an elite few and token female presence, joins with a "charming hat" the archaic Parliamentary club, as hinted in the play, and either is left in ignorance of or does not let on about the pretence.

This may seem pedantic and over-complicated beside a simpler, more appealing melodramatic court room triumph and almost-love story Rattigan dedicated, "in the hope that he may live to see a world in which this tale will point no moral", to future Tory MP Paul Channon, son of his friend, American-born Henry "Chips" Channon.

However, that loses the sheer Morton-like cunning artfulness, drive and political nous implicit in the writing's sly subtext in the year of armed forces returning hoping for a brave new world and Churchill's speech on an iron curtain descending in Europe.

In 1908 (or 1912) Britain losing its Empire had more ready cash in the all-too-tempting state pension pot at local post offices and the accumulated small savings of citizens, than in failing commercial banks. Citizens' small savings came from wages paid daily or weekly in money, cash - unlike the debts of tottering credit-driven banks, solely with commercial clients, at the mercy of Britain's fading imperial power, US loans and market crashes. Surely, not so distant from current day news images of Cypriots demonstrating with the placards "Hands off our Provident Funds"?

Interesting also to discover that true-life Archer-Shee father did not work for "Westminster Bank" as in the play (nonetheless, a real bank now part of Royal Bank of Scotland) but as an agent in Bristol of The Bank of England.

Meanwhile, The Winslow Boy's real (half) brother, Major Martin Archer-Shee, was a Conservative MP in the Palace of Westminster.

With the Bank of England acting at the time as the Receiver for insolvencies and the real Royal Naval College, Osborne, closing down eventually in the 1920s, it gives added pith to father Arthur Winslow's telephone call to the College after his son's "sacking". He questions the General Post Office (GPO) telephone operator: "Replace the receiver?". It may again be worth noting 1912 was the year when most of the private telephone companies in the UK were nationalised.

If you're still unconvinced, remember the refusal of the headmaster in Rattigan's next play, The Browning Version, of 1948 to pay out of the public school pension pot for the "Himmler of the Lower Fifth", Crocker-Harris the Classics Master.*

In TLT's opinion, much of The Winslow Boy's genius comes from the knitting together and bridging of many 20th-century themes alongside the stolen postal order story, even possibly up to atomic bomb corporation DuPont Chemicals, transformed with acid wit into "Madame Dupont", French dressmaker to the Winslow femmes.

And the play also reflects accurately the sorry clash of modern corporate state with archaic insolvent institutions, in real life still conning citizens with national insurance numbers that they were the middle-class version of Oliver-Twist-orphan/cadet workhouse subjects with no rights.

Surely no coincidence that maid Violet (Wendy Nottingham in the current production), brought up in an orphanage, evolves through the play into a modern woman? She becomes more and more assured in dealing with both media and tradesmen. Like the small savings of Post Office account holders and the state pension funds of elderly women, she assumes an increasingly important role.

For TLT, this remains a beautifully-crafted, mid-20th century play shaped by its characters, a true story and the increasingly desperate strategies of post-war Tory politicians to veer public opinion their way. There are some good performances but energy and vitality are sapped in this unfocussed production.

See the Financial Times, WhatsonStage and The Observer critics to back up this view. The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and the London Evening Standard critics reserve the right to differ, while blogger Head of Legal seems to play off both sides: Just about an amber light from this reviewer.

By the way, the real-life naval cadet pawn in all this, George Archer-Shee, was killed aged 19, after enlisting as a first lieutenant in the army on his return from a Wall Street job,  in the First World War. So, legal farce turned to tragedy and he never lived to collect his five-shilling-old-age-pension (seven shillings and six old pence for couples if he had married) - unlike his lawyer ...

* Furthermore, the story of George Archer-Shee and the postal order was first mooted as a propaganda movie advertising English democracy. Even so, it was inspired by an American piece on the case by critic Alexander Woolcott, brought to Rattigan, the grandson of a high-ranking colonial judge and MP, by actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Filmmakers rejected it as too "dull" for a movie, Rattigan stuck by it and the rest is history.

30th March 2013 UPDATE:  "Crown Post Office Workers Strike Over Franchise Plans' BBC  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-21974862

25th April 2013 JUST ANOTHER NOTE The beauty of the internet is that when events (as in the apocryphal quote of Macmillan) come along, TLT can add them for posterity or, at least, one hopes, the British Library archive. So, without wanting to diminish the tragic impact of conflict on families, the irony of this story about two First World War soldiers finally laid to rest turning out to be insurance company employees proved irresistible ...