I hear on the grapevine that plans to name a London West End theatre after Terence Rattigan have temporarily stalled. An even better way to honour Rattigan is to revive his plays and the latest such revival is the rarely seen Man and Boy, which opens at the National’s Dorfman theatre at the end of this month. The play had brief runs on Broadway and in London in 1963 with Charles Boyer in the lead and another outing in 2005 with David Suchet giving a mesmerising performance as “the man” of the title, a beleaguered Romanian financier, but to all intents and purposes this is an unknown Rattigan.
I would suggest that it reveals a surprising amount about its author. The first thing to hit one is how much the play’s success or failure mattered to Rattigan himself. It was sparked by a book about the swindling Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger, whose business empire collapsed at the height of the Great Depression. Setting the action in 1934, Rattigan shows his hero, Gregor Antonescu, hiding out in his estranged son’s Greenwich Village apartment to which he lures the chair of American Electric in the hope of securing a life-saving merger. What is shocking is the ruthlessness with which Gregor exploits his son’s sexual charms.
