A theatre industry truism is that playwright Terence Rattigan – a titan of the mid-twentieth century British stage – had his career unfairly derailed by the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, and is surely due a revival soon.
I’m skeptical about this, mostly because I remember people saying it for at least the last 15 years, a period in which I have seen an awful lot of Terence Rattigan plays, usually revived to great acclaim.
The truth is that there was absolutely no way his work was ever again going to scale the insane success of his commercial heyday: he is the only playwright in history to have two plays notch up over 1,000 West End performances. But if his lifelong insistence on writing about posh people undoubtedly took him away from the post-War zeitgeist, he remained pretty damn popular in his later years. And this despite the fact he’d long moved away from the frothy populist comedies that gave him his mega hits, having shifted shape into something altogether more melancholic.
That’s a long way of introducing the Orange Tree’s new production of his penultimate play In Praise of Love. You can see why it doesn’t get revived much: it’s a bittersweet chamber piece that feels like it is set in a very specific time and place, that involves posh people. It’s also based on the lives of actor Rex Harrison and his third wife Kay Kendall, who are considerably less well known now than they were 50 years ago.
But if you’d struggle to see it doing three years in the West End, Amelia Sears’s revival is nonetheless exquisite.
Its protagonists are Sebastian Cruttwell (Dominic Rowan) – champagne socialist manchild and superstar book critic (imagine!) – and his Estonian wife Lydia (Claire Price). As an intelligence officer in postwar Berlin, Sebastian married Lydia to get her out from behind the Iron Curtain, with little expectation that they’d stay together. But they have, rubbing along eccentrically for 25 years, still together in posh, rich Islington middle age, with a 20-year-old son Joey (Joe Edgar) who writes plays and is enthused by a somewhat resurgent Liberal Party.
Production wise it’s classy but not flashy: great accent work, a fine cast who don’t feel they need to pounce on the laughs, beautiful lighting from Bethany Gupwell, Peter Butler’s set dominated by a handsome liquor table so heavily used I started to feel pissed by osmosis.
It plays out as a melancholy farce: Lydia has discovered she’s dying, and doesn’t want to tell Sebastian, reasoning he’s too hapless to be able to cope with it; instead she confides in Mark (Daniel Abelson), her closest friend and a former lover. But Sebastian is less incompetent than he appears and has, in turn, been trying to protect Lydia from the knowledge of her condition.
In Praise of Love is an elegant elegy for Rattigan’s own war-time generation. Clearly Sebastian and Lydia’s great days are behind them, and in a way everything since the war has been a long anticlimax for them. They were only thrown together by very specific circumstances and were never really suited to each other. They have come out of 25 years together scarred and bruised and awkward. And yet they love each other; they love Mark; they love Joey. It papers over all the cracks. It means they can forgive each other.
But if the title suggests somebody is going to leap onto a table and make a big speech about how awesome love is, Rattigan isn’t so vulgar as all that and is firmly in show-don’t-tell mode. He’s also on top form as a craftsman: In Praise of Love works because it’s the definition of bittersweet, simultaneously a sad play and a happy one as it follows two people finally coming to understand each other even as they reach the end of their time.
Of course Terence Rattigan is never again going to be anything like as popular as he was at his war-time peak, but in 2025 I don’t think anyone seriously doubts his greatness – if they ever really did.
