After the shlockfest of Lucy Bailey's Macbeth, what a relief it was on Thursday to renew acquaintance with a director who simply sets out to do her best by the play and the audience, without any imposition of theatrical ego. I mean of course Thea Sharrock, who adds to her impressive record in tackling everything from Shakespeare to Coward with this little-known early play by Terence Rattigan. Before seeing the play, I went to her platform talk in the Lyttelton Theatre, which yielded several fascinating insights. She saw the only recent revival of After The Dance by Dominic Dromgoole and the Oxford Stage Company in 2003, thought 'What a great play!' and stumbled on it again more recently while browsing in French's Theatre Bookshop. After reading it, she proposed it to the National Theatre. At first Nicholas Hytner said no, then changed his mind, no doubt conscious of the National's relative neglect of Rattigan, one of the great masters of the traditional well-made play.
In the words of Sharrock, 'There are a huge number of playwrights who could learn a lot from Rattigan, to be brutally honest.' My sentiments exactly. But as she pointed out, the emotional depth of his characters means Rattigan is far more than a mere craftsman who knew how to get the structure right. He has a remarkable gift for understanding women, and knows exactly how people alternately suppress and reveal their true feelings. In this respect, After The Dance foreshadows his much better known plays of the 1950s, such as The Deep Blue Sea, in which Sharrock directed the great Harriet Walter seven years ago. I was lucky enough to catch that touring production from the Theatre Royal Bath on a visit to Brighton.
Initially opening in June 1939 to rave reviews which suggested a repeat of his long-running first hit French Without Tears, After The Dance folded after just 60 performances, a casualty of the countdown to the outbreak of war. Rattigan left it out of his collected works and apparently never sought to revive it, leading it to be almost completely forgotten. Is Sharrock right in thinking it a great play? On balance, I think so. Like all of Rattigan's work, it's beautifully constructed with believable characters and a wonderful balance between comedy and tragedy, played out against the background of an approaching war. This is the play, it seems to me, that Noel Coward might have written but never did. It shows the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, the crazy frivolous generation that Coward immortalised in his song I've Been To A Marvellous Party, as they enter middle age. Still partying, they are confronted with a younger, more sober and more political generation who they despise as 'boring'. 'They never were bright and now they're not even young,' says one character. 'He's gone dreary on us' is the ultimate put-down for the partying couple David and Joan Scott-Fowler and their sponging permanent house guest and friend John Reid. David is a lazy writer who drinks too much, a weak man who easily succumbs when he is targeted by Helen, the 20-year-old girlfriend of his young secretary and cousin. As the marriage collapses in the middle of yet another party, Joan, who has always disguised her real love for her husband, falls to her death from the balcony. The play's third act is more than just an epilogue. John persuades David to give up his plan to marry Helen, who has made him go on the wagon, and the play ends with David poised to renew his romance with the whisky bottle. The play works because the emotions are raw and genuine, though Rattigan's distinction between characters who are really in love and those who aren't seems rather too simple 70 years later. It also works because Rattigan never lapses into preachiness; while sharing leftwing concerns about fascism and the threat of war, he was no mean partygoer himself, and the inter-generational battle between the ageing bright not-so-young things and the childish prigs is well balanced.
Sharrock's deft directorial touch, as always, allows the play and the characters to speak for themselves. Nancy Carroll and Benedict Cumberbatch are just the right age (mid-30s) to play Joan and David. Cumberbatch doesn't quite convey the sense of a man one step away from dying of cirrhosis of the liver, looking not quite sozzled enough in the early scenes. I found his sudden declaration of love for Helen rather too sudden to be plausible, but he conveys David's emptiness very well. Carroll is terrific and Joan, and a third outstanding performance comes from Adrian Scarborough as John, who makes the most of the play's funniest lines. Because his tendency to treat life is a joke is so well played, his sudden switch to being serious is all the more effective. Altogether, this is one of the best things I have seen in 2010. I haven't been to every play that Thea Sharrock has directed, but I've seen most of them, with the recent exception of The Misanthrope. It's theoretically possible that eventually the law of averages will strike and she will end up with a dud, but frankly I can't see it happening. Like Hytner and the Donmar's Michael Grandage, her productions don't get bogged down in half-baked concepts. If there is any justice in the world, she will one day become the first woman to run the National Theatre. I just hope I'm still around to see the results.
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