Tone down the spiv, Robert, and crank up the pathos
In Praise Of Love (Ustinov Studio, Bath) Verdict: Rattigan regrets
TERENCE Rattigan was nearing the end of his life when he wrote the 1973 play In Praise Of Love.
A neglected wife has a terminal illness and hopes to keep the news from her self-absorbed husband. The story is a vehicle for the great Rattigan value of emotional reserve — which, on stage, can paradoxically be terribly moving.
Yet my headlights remained resolutely undampened by a Bath revival starring Robert Lindsay (right), the likeable Tara Fitzgerald and Julian Wadham, who plays the couple’s best friend.
Lydia, the wife, is from Estonia and suffered badly in her homeland during World War II. She owes her current life in London to her husband Sebastian, a sometime British intelligence officer who now writes for an upmarket Fleet Street newspaper. Sebastian is priggish, conceited and a designer socialist. A perfect role for our Robert! For this relationship to work on stage, Sebastian possibly needs to be more lowkey than Mr Lindsay makes him. His performance contains a lot of eyebrow work, a slipping accent and a generally spivvy nature, with sleeves rolled off the wrist, a vain beard, natty clothes and canny glances.
In the small Ustinov Studio you are close enough to the actors to see every twitch.
I could have done with Sebastian being more indolently unkind to his wife, more fogeyish, more Rattiganesque. That might wring more pathos out of later developments.
Miss Fitzgerald puts her all into Lydia’s Estonian-English accent. Too much at times.
The scenes of devotion between her and Mr Wadham’s ambiguous American, Mark — who loves Lydia but is also gay — are the most affecting.
It is always a treat to watch Rattigan and there is a strong undertow of regret as the fading playwright dwells on ‘le vice
Anglais’, which to him means our British refusal to admit to our emotions.
I don’t think it was the vice that prevented me from connecting completely with this production.
Still worth seeing, though.