Summer 1954: this Rattigan double bill is a stirring examination of English repression
Terence Rattigan achieved success relatively young, becoming one of the most popular dramatists of the postwar period and, at one stage, he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world. The tide changed for his career as a playwright when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and the theatrical cult of the Angry Young Men came along in the late 1950s and 1960s and dealt a cultural broadside to Rattigan’s brand of genteel drama examining the psychic cost of English repression.
This double bill, with the unusual pairing of his one-act plays The Browning Version and Table Number Seven (from Separate Tables), offers an insight into a bygone age and a chance for today’s theatregoers to see why Rattigan was so feted in his time. James Dacre’s assured and sensitively paced touring production draws out Rattigan’s vivid characterisations, witty dialogue and deep-dives into the vagaries of the human heart.
In Table Number Seven, Nathaniel Parker brings a stirring pathos to the bogus Major Pollock, a long-term resident of the Beauregard Hotel in Bournemouth run by Miss Cooper (an empathetic Lolita Chakrabarti). It’s an era during which unmarried women of a certain age like Alexandra Dowling’s easily distraught Sybil Railton-Bell were called spinsters, everybody dressed for dinner to sit at lonely tables in the hotel dining room and emotional agitation was couched in vapid musings about the weather.
When a court report reveals that Major Pollock has been ‘importuning male persons with improper suggestions’, Sybil’s mother Mrs Railton-Bell, played with exactly the right shade of entitled righteousness by an astonishingly energetic 91-year-old Siân Phillips, leads the charge in fomenting hatred and intolerance among the guests that is eventually resisted when Sybil and other guests learn to find their voice.
Yet the actors could have invested a tad more charge into the emotions roiling beneath the surface in all the characters (even Rattigan’s minor characters are sharply drawn) because subtext is the key to revealing the cleverness of Rattigan’s writing. While this version takes the idea of the major propositioning men from Rattigan’s earlier draft, it’s intriguing to ponder how this play might have landed differently had the crime in this production been the sexual harassment of women as it was when the play originally premiered.
Parker is also the leading man in the more timeless The Browning Version and gives a brilliantly attuned performance as Andrew Crocker-Harris, a Classics teacher on his last day at an English boys’ boarding school who has to confront a sense of failure exacerbated by his wife’s infidelity. When Crocker-Harris is gifted Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon by a student and told that he is thought of as ‘the Himmler of the Lower Fifth’, it triggers a deep soul-searching. As his younger wife Millie, it’s a shame that Chakrabarti, whose stage presence leans more towards the majesty and gravitas that perfectly suited Miss Cooper in Table Number Seven, does not capture the character’s vivaciousness.
Still, Summer 1954 is a well-crafted production that rewards audiences who make it through the 150-minute runtime. There’s the added bonus that its run overlaps with a rare revival of Look Back in Anger at north London’s Almeida. Watching these plays closely together provides a fascinating insight into the creative forces that have shaped the British theatrical landscape over the last 70 years.
Until Nov 2; theatreroyal.org.uk