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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.
So why revive it now? Well, duh. Jeffrey Epstein is just the most obviously analogous figure for Gregor among a contemporary rogues’ gallery of cheats, manipulators and grifters. “Liquidity and confidence,” is all Gregor needs to make a deal, and he will use the latter to create the illusion of the former. He will also use insider knowledge of a business rival’s homosexuality to bamboozle him into a deal, by pretending his son is his “petit pederast” lover and can be shared.
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The depiction of homosexuality, though still guarded, is unusually direct for Rattigan. The play is also unusually autobiographical, fictionalizing his own relationship with a glamorous, dynamic but unloving father. To complete the hat-trick of departures from what is accepted as a “typical” Rattigan work, this is not at all one of his so-called “well-made” plays. It’s a monologue with some supernumerary characters attached to feed lines and supply context.
The action takes place in Basil’s basement apartment in Greenwich Village, which features the aforementioned tables, a piano, a clothes rack and a green baize floor. Above the doorway are the words “Knock Knock” in art deco lettering; the play’s title and the cast list appear in the same font on a billboard behind one tranche of the audience. There are blurts of melodramatic movie music, a background murmur of jazz drums and double bass. The implication is that Gregor’s performative cheating is somehow linked to the explosion of artistic expression in 1930s New York.
But first we see Basil, a bohemian and a socialist, preparing for his gig playing piano in a local bar by necking copious amounts of hooch and avoiding talk of marriage with his actress girlfriend Carol. When Gregor arrives, we learn Basil tried to shoot him five years ago, ran away, changed his name and never mentioned his parentage. Gregor, meanwhile, married a London typist and bought her a title, and told everyone his illegitimate son had died. Basil’s drinking, his politics and his unwillingness to commit are explained.
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Kynaston does a fine job of fleshing out a character who has only two states of being, alternately worshipful of and disgusted by his dad. Malcom Sinclair’s gay businessman Herries, Leo Wan as his lawyer, Phoebe Campbell’s Carol and Isabella Laughland as “Countess” Antonescu are purely functional characters, deployed and discarded. Nick Fletcher, however, wrings subtle comedy from Gregor’s endlessly put-upon factotum Sven, who is also the closest thing Gregor has to a friend.
At what seems their moment of triumph, the two howl like wolves to a dissonant drum solo. This obscure play is already miles away from the clipped tones and class-bound stiffness associated (however wrongly) with Rattigan, but Lau clearly feels it needs a gloss of expressionistic lighting and exaggerated movement. And he’s probably right. The heightened staginess ramps up the excitement of a minor play, and provides a framework for Ben Daniels to strut his stuff. It’s an oddity, this, but worth seeing for him.
Man & Boy at the National Theatre, until March 14, nationaltheatre.org.uk
