Review: In Praise of Love
In Praise of Love Ustinov Studio, Bath
Such is the lure of seeing two of the country’s finest actors perform in the intimate setting of Bath’s Ustinov Studio that the nine matinee performances sold out even before the production opened.
Robert Lindsay and Tara Fitzgerald star in Terence Rattigan’s In Praise of Love, the final play in the Theatre Royal’s summer season and the Ustinov directorial debut of the season’s artistic director Jonathan Church.
And it is fabulous, as though the theatre has been saving the best until last – quite something as the excellent season has also included The Price, God of Carnage and Switzerland.
Lindsay and Fitzgerald are electrifying together as husband and wife Lydia and Sebastian in this play about love, about concealed truths within a marriage and about British reticence.
Lydia, an Estonian refugee whom Sebastian married to give her a passport some 28 years earlier, is dying. She has just heard that her condition is terminal but keeps this fact from him and instead confides in their mutual friend Mark, the events unfolding over the course of two nights.
Sebastian, once a promising novelist but now a literary critic, is cantankerous, self-centred and selfish, something that Lydia tolerates with amusement. He intended to divorce her years ago but has somehow not got around to it.
Throughout this play, which is deeply moving and a riveting story, the dynamic is taut, the dialogue fizzes with wit and it is wickedly funny.
The lead performances of Lindsay and Fitzgerald as Lydia and Sebastian – by turn amusing, excruciating, captivating – are never less than enthralling. Lydia drunk, flirtatious, trying to organise what will be after she is gone, contrasts absolutely with the sardonic Sebastian’s own suppressed emotions.
Julian Wadham as Mark – who for years has been in love with Lydia – is quietly superb as the gobetween and arbiter of truth.
And there’s a good turn from Christopher Bonwell as the son Joey, eager young playwright and a Liberal Party campaigner who is despised by his dyed-in-the-wool Marxist father.
Sebastian’s thoughtless treatment of his son brings things to a head and he confesses his own secret to Mark, revealing that he’s perhaps not such a bastard after all.
Rattigan’s play, written in the mid 1970s, is beautifully crafted, the emotional machinations of the central characters mirrored by the combative games of chess that the men engage in on stage.
It was the playwright’s final play – “one last play by which he might be remembered” – partly autobiographical and written when he knew he was dying himself.
It was also inspired in part by the death of Kay Kendall, wife of his friend Rex Harrison who had to decide whether or not to tell his wife about her diagnosis of terminal leukaemia. He chose not to.
This new production, with a magnificent set design by Tim Hatley, is certainly one to remember and if you can possibly get a ticket, do so. It’s one of the theatrical highlights of the year.
In Praise of Love runs at the Ustinov until Saturday 3 November. Tickets from the Theatre Royal Bath box office on 01225 448844 or go online at www.theatreroyal.org. uk/ustinov