Terence Rattigan has long been rescued from the theatrical limbo into which he was cast by Kenneth Tynan and the ironing board. Qualities that caused him to be despised – reticence, obliqueness – now often appear to be not evasions but subtleties. The Deep Blue Sea (1952) has dated better than Look Back in Anger (1956).
Yet All on Her Own, first seen on television in 1968, is more curio than treasure. This half-hour monologue features a woman returning to her Hampstead home from a party. Alastair Knights’s sumptuous production provides a rarity in streamed drama: a glimpse of more than one room, as she glides from semi-darkness into light. She is alone; she has recently been widowed. The questions that arise, with more force as she hits the whisky, are to do with victimhood. Is this a sad or a sinister woman? Was her husband’s death truly an accident or did he kill himself? Did she suck the air from their marriage by her frigidity and the frostiness of her disagreements?
This is a fine chance for Janie Dee to show her delicacy as an actor – her face is sodden with despair – and her versatility. She investigates her marriage and herself by ventriloquising her husband, mocking herself for the crudeness of her reproduction of different kinds of northern accent. Yet the cards are stacked from the beginning: she is an anxiously respectable southerner, so likely to be frigid; he is more robust, more truthful, probably sexier. She gets doubly punched: first she is pitiful because solitary; then she turns out to have brought her isolation on herself, so is blameworthy. He, of course, would have settled it with a good, straightforward row. Well, he was a builder, so perhaps Rattigan thought he kept “hammer and tongs” in his tool box.
