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Ben Daniels commands the limelight, steals every scene and would chew the scenery if there were any in Anthony Lau’s stylised and unexpected revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1963 curiosity about a corrupt financier. Daniels’s Gregor Antonescu is a wily, thrillingly monstrous monopoly capitalist prepared to use his own estranged son Basil (Laurie Kynaston) as sexual bait in a bid to save his fraudulent global empire, in the post-crash New York of 1934.
Looking like the portrait in Tom Hiddleston’s attic, he stalks the stage with a lean, kinetic, raptor’s mien, glorying in verbal combat in a meticulous Romanian accent, ready to pounce on any weakness. He mounts the three tables that make up the bulk of the set as if they’re a winners’ podium and intimidates an accountant by squatting on his closed briefcase, like the creature in Fuselli’s painting The Nightmare. It’s a great, grandstanding, over the top performance, though even Rattigan’s most ardent cheerleaders would struggle to call this a great play.
