The re-evaluation of Terence Rattigan had already begun by the time
Cause Célèbre,
adapted from a radio play, received its West End première four months
before his death in 1977. In Thea Sharrock’s revival for Rattigan’s
centenary year it constitutes, like so much of his work, an indictment
of bourgeois pieties and hypocrisies every bit as scathing as those of
the Angry Young Men who had eclipsed him in the 1950s and Sixties. Once
again his subject is the inconsistent assumptions knotted through that
most English of awkward subjects, sex. Not, on this occasion, coded
allusions to his own homosexuality; by this time he was both open about
his sexuality and no longer criminalised as a result of it. But today
as in the Seventies when it was written and the Thirties when it takes
place, we have a way both of investing sex with almost transcendental
significance and yet refusing to speak candidly of it, making it at
once both totem and taboo. This confers power on the administrators of
these paradoxical values: the middle-class, the male, the censorious of
whatever stripe.
Rattigan had been
fascinated by the 1935 trial in which 39-year-old Alma Rattenbury and
her 18-year-old lover George Stoner were accused of murdering
Rattenbury’s 68-year-old architect husband. In
Cause Célèbre
he found his dramatic key to the story: alongside the account of the
Rattenbury trial and the two accused’s stormy affair, he interwove an
account of a female juror (whose personality was to some extent based
on that of his own mother) who begins the trial implacably prejudiced
against Rattenbury but finds that the evidence adduced and her own
family upheavals each come to illuminate the other. Both these sets of
personal passions are contrasted with, at one extreme, the press and
public’s ostentatious baying for blood, and at the other the jaded
urbanity with which prosecuting and defence counsel present their cases.
Anne-Marie
Duff plays Alma as if she is often bewildered by her own life, riding
switchbacks of emotion, zoning in and out of the reality around her.
Niamh Cusack as juror Edith is as buttoned-up as any Rattigan
protagonist has ever been, except where her teenage son is concerned.
Nicholas Jones as Alma’s smooth-talking barrister fully deserves to be
called a “silk”. Sharrock’s production does not feelingly convey the
intensity of these people’s feelings in contrast to the prevailing
mores; this is a more distant evening than her award-winning revival
last year of Rattigan’s
After The Dance, but no less elegant in its way.
Written for the Financial
Times.