As with No 11 buses, so with this early 1939 play by Terence Rattigan: you wait ages for a revival and then two come along at once. Dominic Dromgoole is to direct the play in the autumn. But he has been pipped at the post by the enterprising Oxford School of Drama who prove it to be a fascinating exploration of Rattigan's abiding theme: the inequality of passion and the fatal danger of repressing feeling.
Writing the play in New York in 1937, Rattigan clearly set out to attack the irresponsible hedonism of the bright young things. His hero, David, is a popular Mayfair-based historian suffering from acute laziness and cirrhosis of the liver: he and his wife, Joan, have partied away much of their 12 year marriage, surrounding themselves with social butterflies and live-in parasites.
But Helen, an earnest young Oxonian, falls in love with David and vows to rescue him from his dissipation and turn over a whole forestful of new leaves: what she doesn't understand is his inherent spinelessness or the strength of his wife's unarticulated love.
In part the play is the work of Rattigan the radical moralist who bitterly condemns the frivolity of the post-1918 generation. But Rattigan, who had drunk and gambled away many of his own earnings from French Without Tears, also clearly empathised with his hero's innate fecklessness.
Having starting out by attacking the razzle-dazzle party-givers, Rattigan ends up by understanding that the real tragedy of characters such as David and Joan is their emotional inarticulacy: Joan, in fact, is the forerunner of all those later Rattigan figures who suffer through their inability to express their love.
Not everything in the play works: the intimations of war sometimes sit a little uneasily on a play based on acute psychological observation. But the structure is characteristically tight and Rattigan captures particularly well the hothouse insularity of the Mayfair set who regard Manchester as a foreign city on which the sun never rises.
And, even if the play is a difficult one for drama students in that it depends on a generational clash between youth and early middle-age, it is directed with absolute clarity by Sonia Fraser and performed with total assurance. Adso Brown as the weak, self-centred David has a capacity for stillness rare in young actors. And, among the satellites revolving around him, there is especially good work from Christine King as his misunderstood wife, Jennifer Vaal as the reforming Helen and Vanessa Rossini as the queen bee of the cocktail circuit.
What is really astonishing, however, is that a play as good as this has been neglected for more than 60 years.
