This handsome double-bill of Terence Rattigan’s one-act plays brings together The Browning Version, often seen as one of his finest, with the lesser revived Table Number Seven. The latter proves the more moving. Immaculately paced by director James Dacre, it features a pretender, Pollock (Nathaniel Parker, quietly tragic), parading as an upper-class army man at a well-heeled Bournemouth hotel until he is exposed for “importuning”.
Set in the midst of Britain’s homosexual witch-hunts of the 1950s, and premiering a year after John Gielgud was arrested for cottaging, Rattigan (himself gay) drafted the major to be propositioning men but later changed it to his sexual harassment of women. This production gathers emotional momentum by returning to his original idea, vividly capturing the loneliness of a gay man in a time when homosexuality was seen as a “public menace”.
It plays out arguments for and against acceptance through characters such as the hotel manager (Lolita Chakrabarti, dignified and steely) after an outraged dowager (Siân Phillips, magnificently domineering) outs him to hotel residents. These include her daughter (Alexandra Dowling, the picture of vulnerable spinsterhood) who has found friendship with him.
The cast doubles up for The Browning Version, which premiered in 1948, though it is a shame we do not see Phillips return. Rattigan, a master of capturing the repressed desires and disappointments of postwar Englishness, draws a pained picture of marital malaise between a stolid schoolmaster (Parker) and his frustrated, unfaithful wife (Chakrabarti), whose relationship might be another coded portrait of repressed homosexuality.
You feel pathos for both parties, but there are too many soft edges, the savagery of certain lines not hitting home, with Chakrabarti playing her part in too flat a register this time. The production is melancholic but never swoops into the realm of the tragic, though it certainly reeks of sad marital futility.
Mike Britton’s swirling set of sitting rooms, with its many windows and doors, underlines these characters’ sense of exposure. There is nowhere to hide, as the rooms revolve, and Britton cleverly mixes realism with expressionist elements.
A few years after these plays were written, John Osborne’s ground-breaking Look Back in Anger (currently revived at the Almeida in London) was seen by many, including Rattigan, to banish the drawing-room drama from the stage, and replace it with a new brand of social realism. Going back to these plays now is a fascinating exercise, not only for their dramatic value but in presenting a piece of English social history.
At Theatre Royal Bath until 2 November. Then touring until 15 February
