DROWNING PASSION, TIMELESS RESCUE
Marvellous play, this: wrenches the guts out of you , patches it up and units it again on the onerous street of life and love. It wrenched Terence Rattigan himself, near a lack of his personal: the very first thing he stated after studying his personal horrible information was to conceive of a play beginning “with the body discovered dead in front of a gas fire”.
So it does, although its greatness lies in Hester’s restoration – she forgot to place a shilling within the gas-meter – and the unfolding depiction of her disastrous ardour and crumbling despair. The late moments , when Miller the struck-off physician saves her as soon as extra with bruising, therapeutic fact, are among the best in all theatre. When actors can lead you thru such a actuality with out exaggeration or hamming, it’s an emotional occasion vital in virtually any life.
So it’s a play that wants one of the best; director Lindsay Posner treats it with correct respect, in a note-perfect, seedy wallpaper-crumbling Nineteen Thirties flat, and the casting is ideal, from the primary arrival of the naive younger couple (tremulous Lisa Ambalavanar and nervously dutiful Preston Nyman) with Selina Cadell’s landlady, we’re there in that rooming-house world with its hire anxieties and respectability, quickly conscious that “Mrs Page” isn’t any such factor, however Lady Collyer, runaway spouse of a decide. And that her lover Freddie isn’t any good for her. Every character thereafter hits the best word dead-on: Finbar Lynch’s dourly smart Miller, Nicholas Farrell’s wounded, hopeful Judge, and finally Hadley Fraser’s jaunty, defensive Freddie together with his golf-clubs, letting off steam tipsily to his pal Jackie (Marc Elliott) about how forgetting a lady’s birthday isn’t such a criminal offense and the way terrible it’s to get “tangled up in people’s emotions” and must flee.
They’re all excellent. And after all at their centre is Hester herself: Tamsin Greig. I anxious at first, within the low-key early scenes with Miller, the decide and Freddie himself, that she was far too quiet, dangerously near-inaudible generally, as if giving extra of a refined display than big-theatre stage efficiency. But in impact her presence, energy and judgement outweighed that and the issue improved: I doubt anyone missed something, and her emotional fact – and certainly comedian timing at instances – overwhelmed any misgivings.
She provides us a lady in early mid-life, maybe an excessive amount of protected by respectability for too lengthy, her very work on the wall too timid however with dignity, irony and generally even a darkish wit about her personal helpless want for terrible Freddie . But her very qualities of self-awareness put her in danger as she crumbles into despising what she is and what she has completed along with her life. In the second half her encounters with a collection of males – together with the decide’s unwise “don’t you realize what I’m offering?”, the great, dry wit of her dealings with Philip and her horrible pleading with Freddie – are breathtaking of their truthful, mundane depth. And Freddie too takes the fearful step into honesty with a well-known line, which might be horrible however someway isn’t: “We’re death to each other, you and I”.
Rattigan additionally by no means fails to supply us, simply casually on the aspect, another line that sticks. This time it’s Mrs Elton because the landlady who will get to replicate, as she bustles out, “Strange how one always seems to prefer nice people to good people” .
trh.co.uk. to 21 June
Rating 4
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