Terence Rattigan
David Benedict
It's amazing what working on a masterpiece can do. Commissioned to write a companion piece to Terence Rattigan's magnificent one-act drama The Browning Version, David Hare has abandoned his journalistic tendencies and written a gently oblique play of controlled emotional eloquence. Beautifully directed by Jeremy Herrin and Angus Jackson, the engrossing pairing is a marvel of quiet restraint brimming with fear, love, pain and the whole damn thing."From the very beginning I realised that I didn't possess the knack of making myself liked." As desiccated classics teacher Andrew Crocker- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Terence Davies's screen treatment of Terence Rattigan's play gets plenty of things right, not least its smoggy evocation of the seedy, exhausted London of the early 1950s, with its shabby colours, peeling paintwork and bomb damage. The piece is essentially a three-hander, and Davies's lead trio acquit themselves admirably. Rachel Weisz may be a little too fresh and luminous as Hester Collyer, repressed wife of High Court judge Sir William Collyer, but her determination to break free from her background and claustrophobic circumstances through her affair with ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.Part-inspired by such masterful works of filmic melodrama as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), with more than a touch of the heightened, adulterous shame of Brief Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.Far from being neglected, argued Hare, Rattigan has rarely been out of the limelight, but his work now chimes with the “wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege” which he detects as a hallmark of the David Cameron era. I don’t know Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Terence Rattigan’s art of concealment is what makes The Deep Blue Sea so rich and true an observation of the way people behave. Being deprived of his concealing mask is the crucial idea of the interesting new play partnering it at Chichester to mark Rattigan's centenary: Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, which incorporates an unproduced Rattigan TV script into a drama of why it was not produced.The two plays, acutely directed for Chichester by Philip Franks, make illuminating contrast, too, purely in theatrical method - Rattigan’s straight-up focus on people in a room and the things Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sexual intercourse, according to Larkin, began in 1963. By 1974 it had had a free-thinking, free-loving decade to become comfortable and frankly rather routine. It was the year the Ramones formed, when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was in cinemas and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying on bookshelves. Over at the Royal Court the “angry young men” might still be angry, but weren’t exactly young any more. The sexual revolution had been fought and won, and the cultural battlefield was now overgrown with a riotous tangle of attitudes and influences, each more liberal than the last. It was against this Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Tender, funny and overwhelmingly moving, Trevor Nunn’s revival of this 1942 drama by Terence Rattigan – part of the playwright’s centenary-year celebrations – is a masterly piece of theatre. The big box-office draw may be Sienna Miller, but she’s by no means the star of the show: if there is one, it’s Sheridan Smith, whose performance is nothing short of glorious. But this is essentially a shattering ensemble work, in which every detail glows with truth, compassion and humanity, and where every seemingly ordinary second of life in an existence hemmed in by the ever-present threat of death is Read more ...
graham.rickson
The clipped Fifties accents raise a smile for the first few minutes, but what’s startling about this new production of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play is how universal, how timeless the story is. Director Sarah Esdaile wisely decides to play things respectfully straight, and within seconds the time and place, both beautifully evoked in Ruari Murchison’s detailed set, melted into irrelevance. Maxine Peake plays Hester Collyer, attempting suicide after her boyfriend Freddie has forgotten her birthday. After her life is saved by the enigmatic fellow tenant Mr Miller, her back story is slowly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“There’s no situation in the world that can’t be passed off with small talk,” claims hostess extraordinaire Olivia Brown in Terence Rattigan’s Less Than Kind. It’s a maxim that could well serve as Rattigan’s theatrical epitaph, the philosophy that allows him to smuggle desperation, frustration and steel-capped social critique in amongst the silk peignoirs and smoking jackets of his drama. In celebration of the centenary of this newly fashionable playwright’s birth, the London stage is to be crowded with his work. Treats from Sienna Miller, Trevor Nunn, Simon Russell Beale and Thea Sharrock Read more ...
David Nice
A pall of ennui hangs over the 1930s drawing room of the National’s latest Rattigan revival, as deadly as the boredom its burnt-out party people all dread. The trouble is, I’m not sure to what extent the playwright intended it.To write about the etiolated and the unfocused, the lost souls of the inter-war years, needs energy and clarity. Here, though, some of us went away feeling muddy-headed irritation rather than sympathy at the end of a long evening. That might partly be ascribed to a script that thrusts forward melodrama when it needs truth, but a less than perfect Lyttelton ensemble didn Read more ...