It is possible to be too faithful.
Lindsay Posner’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s celebrated drama
scrupulously identifies the atmosphere, manners and voices of a
middle-class post-Edwardian family as they battle to clear the name of
their younger son, expelled from naval cadet college for allegedly
stealing a postal order. The Winslow family’s accents are not quite
clipped, but certainly crisp, with no sign of more modern glottal stops
or contractions.
Their behaviour is undemonstrative; it may take two years for right to
be done (as the wording has it of the obscure legal instrument with
which they sought to bring their case), but the toll taken on them is
discreet, as is their ultimate triumph. The celebrated barrister and
M.P. Sir Robert Morton (based on Sir Edward Carson in the real-life
Archer-Shee case which inspired Rattigan) is not just emotionally
detached but, in Peter Sullivan’s performance, often comically
alienating. No aspect of the production is overwrought.
And the surprising result is to emasculate the play. Rattigan, writing
almost four decades after the original case of 1908-1911 (and moving it
slightly to take place on the eve of World War I), remained
sufficiently fired by it to champion an ordinary family’s struggle to
assert their honour in the face of an uncaring and obstructive state
apparatus. It is one of the playwright’s finest evocations of the kind
of English decency which so preoccupied him.
Yet, for all their skill and all their diligence, Posner and his cast
convey none of the urgency or cruciality of the issue, no sense of what
is at stake or what is being exalted. It misfires so distinctly that,
when young suffragette Catherine Winslow’s engagement fails under
pressure from her fiance’s conservative family to abandon the case, the
most significant audience response on press night was laughter at that
young man’s scarlet regimental dress uniform.
As Arthur Winslow, Henry Goodman gives one of the most organic
performances I have seen from him, eschewing the over-deliberateness
which is often one of his keynotes; yet this fine central portrayal
fails to animate its surroundings, nor ultimately the character
himself. The safety curtain is painted with the text of the
mid-Victorian statute setting out procedure in petitions of right; I am
afraid the production seems as arid and antiquated as that slab of
19th-century legalese.
Written for the Financial
Times.