This is a classic revival of a classic play by Lindsay Posner, ideally suited to the old-fashioned proscenium arch stage of the Old Vic. I contributed a programme note on the topicality of the play (which you can read at the end of this review). Now I've finally been to see it, and my admiration for Rattigan as a writer has only increased.
It's partly because Posner has rightly avoided all modish attempts to update or change the play, leaving Rattigan's thoroughly up-to-date message about human rights to speak for itself. There's a lovely Edwardian drawing room set for this mock-Edwardian play which fits it like a glove. Above all, there is some marvellous acting, in particular by Henry Goodman as father Winslow, who ages two decades in two years under the strain of trying to clear his son's name. The stage WInslow family really do have the feel of a family, thanks to the cast. Though I feel Naomi Frederick as the suffragettte daughter is a little too cold and restrained. When Catherine Winslow -- the only character that Rattigan invented from scratch -- criticises the barrister Sir Robert Morton for being a cold fish, it seems a bit like a criticism of herself.
The WInslow Boy is an old war horse of a play, so well made and constructed that it is still firing on all cylinders like a vintage Rolls-Royce. Rattigan's technical skill is particularly evident in act one, when Ronnie Winslow, newly expelled from Osborne naval college, appears, then hides in the garden. When his parents return from church, the audience knows something that they don't. When Sir Robert tears Ronnie to shreds and then proclaims he is clearly innocent at the close of the second act, It may be old-fashioned stuff, but it's still surprisingly effective.
LET RIGHT BE DONE
Rattigan’s clarion call for justice remains highly topical, says John Morrison, in considering the fundamental questions raised by the fascinating case of The Winslow Boy.
Nobody dies in The Winslow Boy. Nobody is subjected to waterboarding, beatings or even the humiliation of wearing an orange jumpsuit. The story unfolds in the genteel surroundings of a middle class Edwardian living room in Kensington. But more than half a century on, the play’s message about the importance of human rights resonates even more powerfully today than in 1945 when Rattigan started writing the play.
There are many reasons why The Winslow Boy has stood the test of time. Like most of Rattigan’s work, it is a technical triumph – a courtroom drama that skilfully dispenses with the courtroom, and which brings down the curtain at the end of Act Two with an Edwardian-style coup de théâtre. In a world struggling to assimilate the mass slaughter of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust, the playwright’s choice of a story about a boy and a five-shilling postal order was an inspired piece of lateral thinking. As the author recalled, ‘The drama of injustice and of a little man’s dedication to setting things right seemed to have more pathos and validity just because it involved an inconsequential individual.’ Rattigan understood that for rights to be universal, they have to apply all the way down the line. Even the law-abiding middle classes sometimes need their rights protecting. In fictionalising the true story of 13-year-old naval cadet George Archer-Shee, expelled from Osborne
on suspicion of theft, the playwright knew exactly what he was doing.
Nowadays writers tackling the theme of human rights often prefer to put on stage a scrupulously accurate, edited transcript of real events. Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle Theatre and writer Richard Norton-Taylor first used this method to highlight the Scott Inquiry in 1994, following up with plays about Stephen Lawrence, David Kelly, Guantánamo Bay, Bloody Sunday and the invasion of Iraq. Other writers dramatised the deaths of army recruits at Deepcut Barracks, and my own favourite in the genre was David Hare’s The Permanent Way, about the shambles of rail privatisation. But however effective they may have been on stage, the very journalistic topicality of these documentary dramas limits their theatrical shelf life. The Winslow Boy, by contrast, is fiction and has no sell-by date.
Rattigan’s choice of ‘Let Right Be Done’ as his theme was highly prescient; as the war ended, the victorious allies were negotiating what was in 1948 to become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed two years later by the European Convention on Human Rights. One of the key principles in both documents is access to justice and the right to a fair trial, without which other
rights cannot be enforced. And it is this right, rather than the guilt or innocence of young Ronnie Winslow, which is central to the play. Rattigan’s crucial insight is that this right has to apply to everyone – even a boy who may or may not have stolen five shillings – whatever governments may say about expediency and the greater public good.
Such is the power of Rattigan’s presentation that The Winslow Boy has been called upon in the most high profile of circumstances – the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999 serves as a recent example. During the course of arguments heard for and against the former US president, an impeachment trial manager spoke of truth and the importance of applying the rule of law to all, no matter their position. Quoting the details of Rattigan’s play and the actual circumstances on which it was based, he remarked on the moving significance of the phrase ‘Let Right Be Done’ and its crucial application in the Archer-Shee case.
Let Right Be Done (fiat justitia) is an ancient legal motto which has fallen into disuse in English law.
The 1860 Petitions of Right Act gave litigants such as the Archer-Shee family a mechanism to sue the Crown for breach of contract by addressing a petition to parliament. If the government assented, the phrase fiat justitia was used on the advice of the Home Secretary and Attorney-General. This procedure was abolished in 1947 by the Crown Proceedings Act, which allowed the government (though not the sovereign personally) to be sued for breach of contract like any other party. Rattigan’s play is faithful to the legal issues raised by the Archer-Shee case, though it simplifies some of them, such as the precise employment status of a naval cadet.
More important than the legal detail was the resonance of the phrase ‘Petition of Right’ in English history as the title of a founding constitutional text from 1628 setting out the liberties of subjects in the face of the Crown.
But though the phrase and the petition of right have fallen into disuse, the principle of smooth access to justice is even more relevant today than in the 1940s. Few would deny that the law has got slower. While the Archer-Shees and their fictional counterparts, the Winslows, faced a two-year struggle for justice, the families of the Hillsborough disaster victims waited more than two decades to see their claims of a police cover-up vindicated. Doreen and Neville Lawrence are still waiting for
all the men who killed their son to be brought to justice.
Thanks to the all-purpose ‘war on terror’, state bureaucracies such as the Ministry of Defence have become more, rather than less, skilled at avoiding attempts to hold them to account. It took
five years for the appalling case of Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist beaten to death while in the custody of British soldiers in Iraq, to reach a full public inquiry. Efforts to hold a wider inquiry into deaths at the hands of the British army in Iraq are still continuing, with the Ministry of Defence
defending itself in similar ways to the Admiralty during the Archer-Shee case a century ago.
Newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Sun have been virulent in their denunciation of the Human Rights Act 1998, without which the death of Baha Mousa would have been conveniently forgotten. The current prime minister has told the Commons he would like to scrap the act in order to ‘make sure decisions are made in this parliament and not in the courts.’ In other words, the right of judges to question the decisions of politicians should be reduced.
This brings us to the crucial argument of Rattigan’s play. Sir Robert Morton, the Tory barrister who takes up the Winslow case, declares ‘No one party has a monopoly of concern for individual liberty. On that issue all parties are united.’ The leading human rights lawyer, Helena Kennedy, has echoed this principle today: ‘Human rights belong neither to the Left nor the Right.’
Rattigan’s politics were on the left; but in 1945 he moved in both camps, as a rich man and lover of the wealthy Tory MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. The Winslow Boy manages to balance the arguments fairly between Morton and the sister of the accused, the progressive suffragette Catherine Winslow. Rattigan sets up a fascinating duel between what Michael Frayn, in an essay on post-1945 Britain, famously called the herbivores and the carnivores. Though suspicious of each other, both Catherine, and Sir Robert are on the same side.
The Winslow Boy is for me a play about human rights that even the carnivores can applaud. I hope the prime minister comes to see it.
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