Name: Review: Summer 1954 at Richmond Theatre
Item: Richmond Theatre
Author: Essential Surrey

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 effectively heralded a new era.

OUR VERDICT

★★★★

This new breed of realistic play effectively eclipsed Terence Rattigan’s elegant, well-made dramas and, as James Dacre’s superb double-bill amply proves, the theatre lost much when it sidelined Rattigan, for few dramatists have so astutely - and compassionately - portrayed the depths and trials of the human heart.

Taking two of Rattigan’s single act plays - his renowned The Browning Version allied to one of the two short plays from Separate Tables called Table Number Seven, director James Dacre describes the first-time pairing as ideal companions: “both pocket epics in which Rattigan manages to compress entire lifetimes- and untold passion and pain - into barely an hour of devastating drama.”

Indeed, both plays pack a hefty emotional punch and presage changing times as socially rigid postwar Britain slowly thawed into a more liberal society.

Bestowing the title of Summer of 1954 conveys this important moment as attitudes were altering, something seen to vivid effect in Table Number Seven. Here at Bournemouth’s Beauregard Private Hotel, the epitome of genteel respectability, many long-term guests are seeking a quiet retreat, but deeply repressed emotions come rising to the surface when one Major Pollock is revealed to have ‘importuned’ young men on the esplanade, a deed which horrifies the hotel’s imperious resident matriarch Mrs Railton-Bell.

Sian Phillips is magnificent, her performance perfectly pitched. In the play’s first Fifties performances Pollock’s offence, thwarted by the day’s censorship, was changed to harassing women in a cinema but Dacre has rightly chosen to restore the original plot.

Railton-Bell is a deeply conservative woman and utter faith in her own (misguided) convictions which she assumes will always prevail. She also controls and dominates her reclusive daughter Sybil (Alexandra Dowling) and it’s the latter’s eventual quiet rebellion which mirrors the shifting perspectives of the hotel residents, with tolerance replacing swift condemnation.

Nathaniel Parker is thoroughly persuasive as the poignant Pollock, a closet homosexual trying to find his place in the world and many of the supporting cast are excellent, particularly the ladies forming the hotel’s core group and their enlightened landlady Miss Cooper (Lolita Chakrabarti).

Mike Britton’s gently revolving set is a real triumph, particularly effective here as it conveys the hotel’s claustrophobic atmosphere and chronicles the day’s evolution beautifully from every perspective.

In the second half of the evening for The Browning Version the scene shifts to a boy’s public school where classics master Andrew Crocker-Harris - named ‘The Crock’ by cheeky pupils - is facing his imminent departure with characteristic stoicism.

Serious and scholarly, he now realizes that he’s utterly misunderstood, ‘the Himmler of the Lower Fifth’ as ruefully acknowledged.

But, as events transpire which threaten his future and reveal his disintegrating marriage, when a pupil buys an unexpected gift, Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, there’s also some hope materialising, offering Crocker-Harris the possibility of personal salvation.

Rattigan’s study of the disillusioned, unhappy schoolmaster is perfectly constructed, with the man’s urbane surface masking the depths of loneliness and frustration beneath, a common theme within Rattigan’s plays; he’s always a true champion of dispossessed, misunderstood and emotionally stultified people.

Again Parker is excellent, merely hinting at the wellspring of personal pain lying beneath Crocker-Harris’ habitual resignation.

So too, is Bertie Hawes’ bewildered schoolboy Taplow and Jeremy Neumark Jones as personable fellow teacher Hunter, a man who finds his own brand of redemption.

Writer and actress Lolita Chakrabarti, so good in the first play, doesn’t quite ring true as Millie Crocker-Harris, too arch if suitably vivacious.

Both plays, skilfully directed, subtly and effectively chronicle the changing mores of the time and reinforce just why Rattigan is experiencing such a renaissance, his incisive understanding of people’s psychology and infinite understanding of human frailty never goes out of fashion, still offering rich theatrical satisfaction today.