ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA at the Olivier, NT: Nothing Left Remarkable...

In 1998 I saw Sean Mathias' woeful ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA at the Olivier Theatre starring an imperious Helen Mirren and an Eeyore-like performance from the late and not-always-great Alan Rickman.  Mirren, Samuel West as Octavius and Finbar Lynch as Enobarbus have lingered in the memory but everything else sucked donkeys.  The audience included actresses like Susannah York, Janet Suzman and Sian Phillips - possibly because it had meant to be the press night which got moved to later in the run - and an odd atmosphere hung over the stalls; probably those actresses thinking "Mirren you poor cow, being in this dog-show!"  And almost 20 years to the day later... here I am in the Olivier, seeing Tony and Cleo again...

The good news is that Simon Godwin's production is better than Matthias' but it is not without it's own sandtraps.  In the more Director-Theatre moments I counted off the already-hackneyed cliches of the modern dress Shakespeare productions du jour - the suited politico costumes for the powerful, the battles staged as machine-gun-rattling, hand-grenade-throwing close-hand combat as in Iraq, a video screen appearing to deliver rolling-news tv coverage of plot that usually happens offstage and the inevitable bulk-bought combat gear.  So far, so un-original.

Luckily Godwin has the powerful combination of Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo to power the three and a half hour production along.  Feinnes was very good as Antony, whose influence and power is dwindling due to his absence from Rome while lounging with Cleopatra in Egypt.  He captured perfectly the world-weary soldier who simply cannot be bothered with the power games of Octavius in Rome but who is dragged back into that world at the death of his neglected wife Fulvia.  First seen in a pair of baggy harem pants and a little pot belly, Fiennes captured the essence of a bored man without making him boring.  I hooted when Antony cracked opened a bottle of beer while talking to his retinue at the start of the play - was Godwin aware of Sid James doing that in CARRY ON CLEO as later referenced by The Smiths in SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS?

There is a telling segment in the documentary THERE'S NOTHING LIKE A DAME where Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins talk about their experiences with ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and Atkins points out that she has never met an actor who didn't complain about playing Antony: namely because only when they have committed to the role, they realize that it is in fact Cleopatra which is the better role and by then it's too late to back out.  She cites Alan Bates in particular as having told her that he disliked it - to which Mags slyly adds "That's because he wanted to play Cleopatra".

The quartet also reflect on the role with Atkins saying she turned the role down four times because she didn't have the courage to take it on and Plowright saying she did not do it when Jonathan Miller asked her to perform it at the National as most people would complain she only got it as she was married to Olivier.  Maggie Smith says she didn't have the courage to play it in the UK so went to Canada to play it away from critical eyes and Dench says she only agreed to do it after asking Peter Hall did he really want his Cleopatra to be a "menopausal dwarf".  Luckily Okonedo is not a dwarf and has the courage to take it on.

In truth she grew into the performance as the evening progressed: she first seemed too lightweight with her oddly-pitched voice to conquer the role - her 1970s Halston pantsuit also was an odd choice - but as we inched closer to the plateau of Act 5 where, with Antony dead, Cleopatra is the focal point of the play, Okonedo assumed the dominance needed and I felt I could not take my eyes off of her.  Our last Cleopatra was Eve Best at the Globe and she resolutely refused to grow in stature in the final scenes where Cleopatra creates and enters into her own legend: no such issues with Okonedo, who went out in an ice-cold blaze of passion.

There is fine work to be found in the supporting performances: particularly Fisayo Akinade as Eros who excelled in the scene where, rather than watch Antony die, he kills himself with Antony's sword.  Gloria Obianyo and Georgia Landers both impressed as Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra's maids who find their own niches in their Queen's legend.

Nicholas Le Prevost as Lepidus and Hannah Morrish as Octavia gave good performances in rather disposable roles while Tunji Kasim as Octavius and Tim McMullan as Enobarbus gave disposable performances in good roles - McMullan's dreary delivery pissing away the glorious "the barge in which she sat" speech.

Hildegard Bechtler's set design was impressive for the Egyptian palace with it's expanse and sunken pools - just begging for someone to be pushed into - but went for dreary corporate design for Rome... yes, we get that Rome is about Power but for God's sake give us some bling.  I am not asking for recreations of the lavish Henry Irving Lyceum productions but spend some cash for God's sake!  Evie Gurney's costumes were also drably dull.

But Godwin - who is leaving the UK to become Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in the US - kept the pace going through-out and the three hours plus running time was unnoticeable.

Again, another ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA falls short of being a truly great production but there is enough there to encourage a visit to see Shakespeare's play about the end of an epoch and the beginning of a legend.  The production will be shown in cinemas as part of NT Live on 6th December, probably the only chance to see it as practically all performances are sold out.  However always bear in mind that day seats are always available to personal callers from 9.30am as well as the online Friday Rush scheme.

HAMLET at the Almeida - something old, something new...

It is now with a regular sense of trepidation that I take my seat to see any play from The Repertoire - it used to be plays pre-20th Century but now even Tennessee Williams has fallen victim to the sweep of Director Theatre - and as the lights go down I ask myself "Am I going to see a version of a classic play that will illuminate while showing why it has stood the test of time - or am I going to see a production by a director who is jamming a classic text into their pre-conceived ideas of audience alienation and quirk-for-quirk's sake gender-blind casting or post-modern tropes?"

It was with the above feelings that I sat down to watch Robert Icke's production of HAMLET at the Almeida and, for most of it's 3 + 3/4 hours running time, I was surprised at the clarity of vision despite the odd anachronistic elbow-in-the-eye.  But then as the climax of the play careered out of control it felt almost like Robert Icke just vomited out all the Director Theatre tricks he had managed to keep down up until then.

Of course nowadays a director feels the urge to give us a HAMLET at about the same time as a name actor edges into the spotlight to play it.  Andrew Scott, this is your 5 minute call... 5 minutes Mr Scott.  I have seen Andrew Scott only once before onstage - DESIGN FOR LIVING at the Old Vic in 2010 - so it was interesting to see him step up to have a go at the gloomy Dane.

For the most part he succeeded but his performance was let down by Icke having him burst into loud tears at the drop of a hat - yes we get it, he's still grieving for his father - and an annoying tendency to over-do the bellowing when Hamlet is riled up.  It's all the more absurd as he has only just told the Players: 

Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings...

But for the most part Scott was very good at speaking the verse - the great soliloquies were not sung out like arias but delivered quietly, as if coming to him for the first time. Where he sits in my league of Hamlets will have to be seen, at the moment I suspect somewhere below Rory Kinnear and my all-time number one Ian Charleson.

That he ultimately did not move me is more the fault of Icke's production than Scott's actual performance.  As I said I enjoyed the first two acts much more than I was expecting and indeed was on board for most of the last act, but as I said above, Icke's botched handling of the climax seemed to almost undercut any chance for the actors to shine.

We had been forewarned to the elements of the botched ending - just as Ivo van Hove's over-reliance on Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' irked during his HEDDA GABLER so Icke's seemingly inexhaustible Bob Dylan collection here very quickly bored, Icke shared Nicholas Hytner's 2010 NT vision of Elsinore as a closed circuit surveillance state and occasionally a large screen dropped down to give us updates on Fortinbrass's progress, to show the security cameras picking up the ghostly presence of the dead King (which actually was very effective) and then to show the reactions of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet to "The Mousetrap" while they sat in the front row of the stalls.

This last bit of business was gimmicky and cumbersome (despite the fact that the handheld cameras showing the royal family also picked up the truly regal Vanessa Redgrave sitting behind them!) but it was distracting from the very fine performances of David Rintoul as the Player King and Marty Cruickshank as the Player Queen.  So the final scene... again the screen appeared to show the onstage duel (which we could see anyway) as Angus Wright and Juliet Stevenson as Claudius and Gertrude sat again in the front row - why??  With the duellists' faces covered up with fencing masks we really needed to concentrate on the King and Queen to get the undertow of emotions but this was totally lost.

But if this stage blocking ruined the personal dynamic between the characters at the climax of the show, the text was drowned out by the BLARING final Bob Dylan song - do you love Gertrude's "He’s fat, and scant of breath...the queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet" or her defiant retort to Claudius' command for her not to drink from the poisoned cup "I will, my lord. I pray you, pardon me"?  Well you won't hear them here as the bloody song blares out while Stevenson mouths the words.  At least her violent convulsions after being poisoned were more convincing than Gertrude's usual drop and die.

And it didn't end there - Hildegard Bechtler's stage design featured sliding glass panels with a hidden room beyond shrouded by curtains.  It immediately reminded me of Tom Scutt's low-fi set for the NT's MEDEA and with Bechtler's low-level leather couches, easy chairs and arty standard lamps, this is an Elsinore designed around 1981 Sunday supplement advertisements.  But at the end, rather than have Horatio (a short-changed Elliot Barnes-Worrall) and Hamlet exchange the famous last words as he dies, we had a musical fugue where the room beyond was revealed to show Polonious and Ophelia slow-dancing together as one by one the Ghost beckoned those recently dead - Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude - to stand up and join the party within...  all of which vanished to show that we had just been watching what was going on in Hamlet's mind as he died.  I am sure if Shakespeare had wanted a parade across the stage at this point he would have done it as in MACBETH and RICHARD III... so Icke, don't bloody make a long night longer just to be fucking contrary!

As I said, this awful version of the play's climax was all the more frustrating as up until then there had been much to enjoy, albeit in a production which seemed to be made up of moments and not a through line of dramatic tension - Scott's delicate handling of the speeches (when not ranting during Ophelia's funeral), the genuinely spooky glimpses of the Ghost on the security cameras as well as well-rounded performances from the always-dependable Peter Wight as a Polonius seemingly beset by early dementia, Barry Aird's sarcastic Gravedigger, Jessica Brown-Findlay's o'erthrown Ophelia, the earlier-mentioned Rintoul and Cruickshank and a suitably volatile Luke Thompson as Laertes.

Juliet Stevenson was a very good Gertrude, slowly coming to realize the truth behind Hamlet's rages; she proved again what a good actress can find within the otherwise frustratingly-thin role - in particular she delivered the drowning of Ophelia speech wonderfully.  Stevenson also provided the unexpected laugh of the evening when she ran out after the raving Ophelia only to go WHONGGG into the closed glass screen door.  However, in keeping with this unpredictable production, as good as Stevenson was, she only showed up how disastrously low-rent Angus Wright was as Claudius; he played it like it was a tech rehearsal.

So another stage HAMLET to add to the pile, my tenth in all.  I would be surprised if I see another production this year, but it is a play that I find endlessly facinating and profoundly moving when done right, alack not here however - Mr Scott, your director done rained on your parade.

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WASTE at the National Theatre: private morality made public

Included in the wonderful John Singer Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery this year was a chalk drawing from 1900 of a handsome young man, matching Sargent's gaze with a knowing smile as if to say "Make sure you capture *all* of my handsome looks won't you?"  The subject was 23 year-old Harley Granville Barker.

 

1900 was an important year for the young actor, not only did he become a lead player with the forward-thinking Stage Society but he also wrote his first play "The Marrying of Ann Leete".

It was through the Stage Society that Barker made two particularly close friends, George Bernard Shaw and the critic William Archer.  Shaw's use of language and dialogue-heavy style of drama influenced Barker in his playwriting and that is very evident in his play WASTE which is now revived at the Lyttelton.

It is fitting that the play should be staged at the National Theatre as it was written in the same year that Barker and Archer wrote "A Scheme and Estimates For The National Theatre", a costed document for the establishment of a UK national theatre, listing everything from staff wages to an idea of the repertoire.  Nothing came of it immediately but the idea refused to go away and long after Barker and Archer's passing, the National Theatre launched in 1963 under the direction of Laurence Olivier.  

For an architect of the concept behind the place, Barker has hardly been well-served by his dreamchild: THE MADRAS HOUSE was staged in 1977 with Paul Scofield and THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE appeared in 1989 and 2006.  Now we have his controversial play WASTE, directed by Roger Michell.  Initially banned by the official Censor in 1907, Barker gave several private productions of it under the auspices of the Stage Society to gain it a copyright - in the first one he even played the lead - but it was not professionally produced until 1936.

To be honest, WASTE is a play that can be admired rather than liked, Barker's scenes can sometimes trip over into being too prolix for their own good - especially if there are more than one character onstage - but usually the scenes involving just two characters create biting argument and tension.

Henry Trebell is an independent MP who is invited by the Conservative Government to head up a bll that he is passionate about, to dis-establish the Church of England.  Trebell is an ambitious politician who need not worry about home distractions as his adoring sister Frances runs that for him.  However at a country house weekend party Henry starts a dalliance with Amy O'Connell, a 'modern', opinionated, separated wife of an Irish freedom agitator.

Although popular with the men, Amy is quietly disliked by the women of the party including Frances for her free-spiritedness, but she suits Henry's teflon life.  All of that is turned upside down when Amy appears in his office in a frantic state after finding out she is pregnant and is determined to have an abortion despite Treball's insistance that she have it.  Days later Amy is dead from a back street abortion that went wrong and Trebell is suddenly facing disgrace with his former political colleagues willing to throw him under the bus.

As I said, my trouble with the play is that while individual scenes are gripping - Amy and Henry confronting each other over the pregnancy, Frances trying to give Henry a reason to live, Frances denouncing her former friend - his scenes with a group of characters soon become a static talking shop with little to animate them.

Roger Michell sadly doesn't really speed the play along, this is really material for a forensic director like Peter Gill or Howard Davies and while Hildegard Bechtler's design can be seen as a tribute to Barker's wish for non-specific theatre design, I suspect the grey & earth tones of her sliding panel set and costumes would suit something a little less site-specific than Edwardian parliamentary London.  I did enjoy watching the pretty patterns during the scene changes.

If you want someone to be put-upon and upper-class then Charles Edwards is your go-to guy.  Henry Trebell follows his roles of Richard II, Charles Condomine in BLITHE SPIRIT and Charles Marsden in STRANGE INTERLUDE and while he again delivers a very fine performance, he cannot make Trebell's singularly callous approach to anyone outside his House of Commons colleagues particularly understandable.

There are good performances from others in the cast but I felt the best came from Trebell's put-upon women.  Olivia Williams has never really bleeped my radar before but here in her climactic scene, she was electrifying: Amy's terror at being pregnant and her panic at the closing down of her opportunities leapt off the stage and swept away the verbose scenes that had gone before.

Sylvestra Le Touzel also gave a very fine performance as Frances, Trebell's protective sister who comes into her own at the end when she realises that her brother is determined on a course of action that she tries desperately to change.  The final scene that finds Frances with a blank canvas for a life gave her ample scope to scrape away at the poised veneer her character has hitherto presented.

All of this is rather swamped by a bizarre design trick just for the curtain call.  Any thoughts about what Barker was referring to by his title: the waste of Treball's life, of Amy's life, of Frances' happiness, of a career, of ideals, is defeated when the cast take their bows on a bare stage apart from a larger-than-life tipped-over wastepaper basket which featured in the final scene when Trebell's secretary was throwing away his post into it.  This clunky, "do-you-get-it?" motif throws the air of quiet desperation that the final scenes suggest into a cocked hat.  Or an upturned, giant wastepaper bin.

Oddly enough, some might say that the title might be pinned on Barker himself who, with his second marriage to the American writer Helen Huntingdon, turned his back on the British theatre for good as she had little time for it.  Shaw could never forgive him for this or for the marriage and they were never reconciled as Barker moved to Paris.  Although never actively involved in theatre again he did translate several plays with his wife as well as writing his "Prefaces To Shakespeare" where for the first time, several key plays were investigated not by a critic or academic but by someone who had directed or acted in them.  This once and future king of British theatre died in 1946.

The American Birthday Play

Happy Birthday to me!  Just to do something out of the ordinary I went to the theatre - twice!  I saw a new American play and a revival of a British play... first off the rank is the American play.

I dawdled over getting tickets for GOOD PEOPLE at the Hampstead Theatre, did I really want to see Imelda Staunton in this bearing in mind I already have tickets to see her as Rose in GYPSY later in the year?  Of course it then sold out and I felt that I had miscalculated.  Luckily for me, THE FULL MONTY came and went at the Noel Coward Theatre and when it was announced that GOOD PEOPLE would take it's place I jumped at the chance of a reduced price offer.

I had a vague idea of the plot from what I had gleaned when David Lindsay-Abaire's play opened on Broadway with it's Tony Award-winning turn by Frances McDormand so it was interesting to come to it clean.  What I found was a play with a sticky and slightly forced first act and a riveting second act.

 

South Boston is not a good place to be, jobs are few and times are tough even for these locals who are used to the art of daily grind for survival. Such is the case with Margie,struggling to get by as a single mother of a mentally-handicapped daughter.  As the play starts her life gets harder when she is sacked from her cashier's job at the local dollar store and her landlady intimates that unless Margie comes up with next month's rent, she will let her son have the apartment instead.

At her wit's end, Margie hears that a friend for her childhood is back in town.  Mike managed to 'get out' and become a successful doctor so Margie wheedles her way into his office ostensibly to see if he can offer her any work but also to get back in with him.  She knows it's a long-shot but is sure he will come through as they used to date as teenagers and his family were 'good people'.

In a testy meeting, Margie does her best to hide her desperation and when she hears that Mike is going to have a party in a few days, wangles an invitation to attend and meet his younger wife Kate.

Mike calls her the day before the party to tell her that due to his daughter's illness he is cancelling it but Margie assumes that he is lying and determines to go to his house anyway and confront him and his "lace curtain Irish" ways.  Up to this point I was fighting to keep interested in the play which seemed all a bit forced with heavy reliance on the gargoyle performances of Lorraine Ashbourne's gobby friend Jean and Susan Brown's landlady Dottie.

 

But what a difference an interval can do.  Mike and Kate's quiet night in is disrupted by Margie who Kate assumes to be a waitress hired by the caterer.  Despite this Margie is welcomed by Kate to stay for a glass of wine and attempts to be the perfect host, unaware of the bristling undercurrent between the other two.

This scene, which plays almost like the perfect one-acter, drop-kicked the play finally into life.  Margie's rage at being discounted from Mike's life, Mike's anger at Margie's emotional blackmail and Kate's gradual realization that she is a stranger to both the people in the room was great to watch with it's shifting emotional tectonic plates, the audience moving their allegiances with each turn.

After this a coda scene closed the show, a small act of kindness being shown to give hope but the play ended on a desolate note, there will always be another bill, another month's rent...

Jonathan Kent's direction seemed to come into it's own in the second act, as I said I found the first act to be rushed and to be heading nowhere but he rose to the challenge of the big confrontation scene by teasing out the uncomfortable suspense until the big explosion.  I also liked Hildegard Bechtler's sets - down-at-heel and cluttered for Margie's world, smooth and clean for Mike's.

Apart from the over-played supporting performances mentioned above, the cast were all excellent.  Matthew Barker was fine as the young manager of the dollar store called upon to sack Margie and bristling over the constant emotional blackmail over his dead mother.

I have always found Angel Coulby's TV performances to be negligible but here she sparkled as Kate, Mike's welcoming and good-natured wife, and when even she reaches her breaking point she made her a formidable opponent.  Lloyd Owen is another actor who has never really impressed in anything, but here he excelled as Mike, unapologetic in his earlier wish to better himself and get out of the festering atmosphere of South Boston.  Towards the end of the confrontation scene, Lindsay-Abaire does pull a rug from under his character which doesn't totally ring true but Owen had by then built up a solid and believable character.

Towering figuratively if not literally above all, Imelda Staunton was the bruised centre of the play.  In a performance of contrasts, Staunton's Margie was defiantly proud of her roots but ashamed of the options it has given her, defiant yet vulnerable, good-humoured but with a bubbling anger at the actions of others, all played at a high level of commitment and energy which was breathless to watch.  Both she and I have come a long way from the Hot Box Club in the National Theatre's 1982 production of GUYS AND DOLLS.  I now am very excited to see her take on 'Rose' at Chichester in October.

Most new American play-writing tends to fade in the more exacting standards of UK theatre and while Lindsay-Abaire's play has it's problems, that febrile second act will stay with me for a long time.

Last week it was time for my second Terence Rattigan play in this, his centenary year. Following on from FLARE PATH, we now have his last play CAUSE CÉLEBRE, he died four months after it's premiere at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1977.The Rattigan revival was kicked off last year by the huge success of Thea Sharrock's production of his little-remembered second play AFTER THE DANCE at the Lyttleton and here she is reunited with her stage designer from that production Hildegard Bechtler to work their magic again - and they do.

Rattigan based his play on a 1935 murder trial that had haunted him. In 1934, in that febrile hothouse Bournemouth, 18 year old George Stoner answered an ad in the Daily Echo "Daily willing lad, 14-18, for house-work; Scout-trained preferred. Apply between 11-12, 8-9 at 5 Manor Road, Bournemouth". The ad was placed by retired architect Francis Rattenbury, 67 and his younger songwriter wife Alma, 39. Before long Alma and George were openly having an affair with Francis' tacit approval as he was not only impotent but a heavy drinker. Six months later, the police arrived in the early hours to find him with his head bashed in and Alma in a state of drunken hysteria.

Alma and George were put on trial for murder in an atmosphere of lurid press headlines that played up the "experienced woman - innocent lad" angle. In a sensational outcome George was found guilty but Alma was found not guilty. A few days later Alma took a train to Christchurch near Bournemouth, found a spot near the River Avon and, believing her lover soon to hang, stabbed herself to death.

The irony was that after a petition of 320,000 signatures, his sentence was commuted to Life. However, in 1942 he was released on early parole, joined the army and fought in WWII, and was even reported to have been seen in the audience at Her Majesty's seeing his 18 year old self be seduced by Glynis Johns as Alma. He died in 2000 aged 83 on the 65th anniversary of the murder.Rather than retell the sad story as is, Rattigan seeks to spotlight the atmosphere of sexual hypocrisy that the case was rife with by contrasting Alma's trial with the fictional story of Edith Davenport, a sexually-frigid, emotionally-cold woman whose own marriage is collapsing due to her husband's small affairs and her puritanical attempts at keeping her teenage son with her and away from the temptations of the world. Out of the blue she is summoned for jury duty - and to her horror, is made foreman of Alma's jury.

He neatly shows that while Mr. Davenport's dalliances for sexual gratification are seemingly understood and turned a blind-eye to by society, the same cannot be granted to Alma whose sexual frustration is seen as something abhorrent especially when her lover is a younger man, the poor boy preyed upon by a wicked woman. The fact of a woman being judged more for her morals rather than any perceived crime had been the case over ten years before with the tragic hanging of Edith Thompson and was certainly a factor twenty years later in the case of Ruth Ellis.Rattigan said he didn't have far to look for his inspiration for Edith as he based the emotionally-fraught scenes between her and her sexually curious son on the relationship between him and his mother. In a remarkably hard-edged performance, Niamh Cusack excelled as Edith, a woman who finds at the end of the play that the woman she despised but could not find guilty thanks to her own morality, could not live on because of her own morality.

She was complemented well by Simon Chandler as her husband John, exhausted by years of living by her rules and Lucy Robinson as her more gregarious sister Stella, mad with excitement about the latest gossip from the jury room.Rattigan has great fun with the legal scenes in showing the court-room cat & mouse games between the defense and prosecuting councils are merely the public jousting to revenge losses between them on the golf courses. Nicholas Jones is a stand-out as T.J. O'Connor, Alma's wily Defence Council who gambles constantly with his handling of her case.

In a a role that only amounted to two bookend scenes, the consummate supporting actress Jenny Galloway still managed to shine as Alma's live-in companion Irene Riggs and Tommy McDonnell was a cocky and dangerous-to-know George in this, his professional stage debut. The echoes of AFTER THE DANCE were in the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch's father Timothy Carlton as the doomed Francis.
But the show was rightly dominated by Anne-Marie Duff's high-voltage performance as Alma. First seen playing with the gauche George by adopting a stolen-from-the-movies divinely decadent lady of the manor demeanor, the play's structure of flashback scenes had her moving from bring strained and drawn in court to be blindly hysterical while blindly drunk to being finally a shattered woman, her declared innocence a hollow victory. She was mesmerising.

The play's strangely amorphous quality where scenes move from place to place, forwards and back in time, betray it's origins as a 1975 radio play which starred Diana Dors as Alma (wow!) - both Rattigan's radio script and an initial stage version were edited together by the director Robin Midgeley with the ailing Rattigan re-writing when necessary. Thea Sharrock however keeps a firm grip on the narrative and the play is helped immeasurably by Hildegard Bechtler's set which opens up the whole of the Old Vic stage with walls constantly moving between scenes to provide new vistas with several hugely effective uses of the stage's depth. Again these visually arresting scenes emerge from the shadowy gloom of Bruno Poet's dreamlike stage lighting.When Rattigan wrote his play he left out some intriguing facts about the case: Alma was actually Canadian, having met George in 1923 while he lived and worked there as an architect of some renown Alma's first husband was killed in the Battle of the Somme and she volunteered to be a nurse in the French Red Cross where she was wounded twice in action and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Her second husband was a Pakenham so was distantly related to Lord Longford who later was such a supporter for the release of Myra Hindley.

When George's first wife refused him a divorce he harassed her mercilessly - stripping their home of furniture and turning off the power. He eventually moved Alma in and forced his wife to live on the first floor until she eventually agreed to a divorce and they were married in 1925. These actions were seen as in the Canadian newspapers as a shocking scandal. In 1929 they left Canada after his first wide died and his sons by that marriage disowned him. So his murder at the hands of Alma's lover 12 years later was headline news here and there.

The Rattenbury's youngest son John was evacuated to Canada in WWII and eventually, following in his father's footsteps, became an architect and joined Frank Lloyd Wright's practice helping with the design of the Guggenheim Museum amongst others.

Twice this week I have come away from the National Theatre pondering how hard it must be for artistic directors as to how to fill their schedules.

The Donmar or the Menier for example are looked upon as having a certain caché but with runs allotted to a month or so that means these theatres at best can stage only 12 productions a year - and what plays get chosen? Monetary demands mean that a healthy sprinkling of popular titles and playwrights crop up again and again... but what gets left behind? What falls through the cracks?

The reason for these musings is down to seeing two excellent revivals of little-known early plays by Terence Rattigan and Tennessee Williams currently playing to packed houses at the NT.

Think of a Rattigan that gets revived and you will probably have THE WINSLOW BOY, THE DEEP BLUE SEA or SEPARATE TABLES on your list. At the Lyttleton however, Thea Sharrock has directed a revival of Rattigan's second play AFTER THE DANCE which I saw with Owen, Sharon and Eamonn.It opened in June 1939 to good reviews and enthusiastic audiences who no doubt responded to not only the high drama onstage but Rattigan's capturing of the zeitgeist of the country as it approached an unavoidable war. However this very atmosphere also was the production's downfall and as the situation worsened the play ended it's run after 2 months, less than a month before war was declared.

Rattigan appears to have had mixed feelings about it in hindsight, not including it in his Collected Plays when first published, probably because of it's failing to achieve as big a box office success as his later plays. There is also a theory that he was haunted by using the possible suicide of a young lover as a plot device in the play but then he is accused of using the same incident 13 years later in THE DEEP BLUE SEA so it appears to have been a handy haunting.The years in between might have lost out but it is this year's gain as what Sharrock's production showcases is a beautifully-crafted three-act play which nails a moment in time perfectly while also providing 5 cracking parts for actors to shine in.

Surprisingly only now making his NT debut, Benedict Cumberbatch (God, that name) is paired with the always-watchable Nancy Carroll as David and Joan, an archetypal Golden Couple who now find themselves at the wrong end of the 1930s after 12 years of marriage and secretly realise that their excessive round of drinks, parties, larks and more drinks will not stand scrutiny in the gray light of a possible war in Europe.

Independently wealthy, David is drinking himself into an early grave while half-heartedly writing a biography of a little-known Balkan hero. Joan fills in her time by being the effortlessly chic hub of a circle of feckless, equally-sensation-craving group of drinking friends. She also chooses to ignore her husband's frequent but non-threatening flings with pretty young things for to mind would of course be a crashing bore.

They also share their large London flat with John (Adrian Scarborough) one of their drinking friends who has become an unofficial lodger and spends his time happily lying on the couch singing for his supper by keeping them amused with his cutting quips about all and sundry. Also sharing the flat is David's cash-strapped cousin who he 'employs' to type up the occasional page of his never-ending book and the couple are friendly with his fiancee Helen (Faye Castelow) who is a frequent visitor.

Of course what soon becomes apparent is that Helen is besotted with David, determined to lead him to the right road of Great Writing and Sobriety through her devotion. She manages to get her doctor brother to examine David and he is confronted with the fact that he is in the early stages of Cirrhosis. David's vanity cannot withstand Helen's passionate declarations and eventually confesses that he has fallen for her too and knows with her help he can lead a Life With Meaning.Helen then becomes that most dreaded creature, one who knows that everyone will be happier if they all know the plain truth. She confronts Joan on the afternoon of a huge party being held at the flat and tells her plainly that Joan's marriage is over as David now loves her.

Joan responds just as Helen and David expect, calm and excepting of the ways of the world, however the reality is witnessed by an appalled John who finds Joan, broken and in despair. The party goes ahead but events take a shattering turn from which their lives are changed just as the approaching war will change their world forever.

Thea Sharrock's direction is a model of empathy and clarity, her handling of characters who could easily be looked upon as irritating and distancing are instead presented to us with an immediacy and sympathy that is rare among today's directors. Both Scarborough and Castelow appeared last year on the same stage in Rupert Goold's take on J.B. Priestley's TIME AND THE CONWAYS in which the characters were treated as mere caricature. Here Sharrock is unafraid of allowing her characters to have an inner emotional life which resonates strongly.

She has elicited strong performances from her cast, namely from Cumberbatch, Carroll and Scarborough, all of whom know exactly how to balance the brittle, knowing banter of the opening scenes with the raw emotional hurt that all the stylish wit is a carapace for.

Nancy Carroll was quite breathtaking as Joan, her early scenes suggesting the unforced, confidant glamour of Kay Hammond but shattering that image with her lonely devastation at the news of her husband wanting to end their life together.

Cumberbatch fitted almost seamlessly into the role of David, he even resembled any number of tall, ramrod-backed, English leading men like Michael Rennie or David Farrar. However like Carroll he also found layers of emotion within David which while not making him sympathetic, did make his choices understandable.

My friend Sharon asked me afterwards if I thought Adrian Scarborough was a possible future Knight of the theatre and his performance here suggested it's possibly only a matter of his getting a tiny step up to some good lead parts. Again he gave a subtle and nuanced performance as John, scathingly funny with the timing of death but able to suggest the anger, fear and loneliness of a man all to aware of the superficiality of his place in life.
Faye Castelow was fine as the frighteningly single-minded Helen although even Rattigan would have been alarmed by her Cut Glaws Eckcent which could have been slightly toned down. In a fine supporting cast special mention must be made for yet another exquisite performance by Jenny Galloway as Miss Potter, the no-nonsense, Widdecombe-esque copy typist that David finally employs.

A special word of praise for Hildegard Bechtler's deliciously sprawling set design for David and Joan's apartment and ravishing costumes, especially for Nancy Carroll. In particular, I really liked the subtle changes that turned the set from the casually elegant, lived-in home of the first two acts to the cold and empty haunted space of the third. Mark Henderson's lighting also was beautifully used to enhance the play.Next year is Rattigan's centenary and it is being marked with not only a retrospective at the National Film Theatre of films and tv plays based on his many works - PLEASE let them show the 1955 film of THE DEEP BLUE SEA starring Vivien Leigh - but a tribute at Chichester (where he has never gone out of fashion) and yet another screen remake of THE DEEP BLUE SEA but directed by Terence Davies which sounds quite exciting. So roll on next year!

In the meantime get yourself to the National Theatre to see AFTER THE DANCE.