Terrence Rattigan was already dying of leukaemia when he wrote In Praise of Love in 1973, and this story of the marriage of once-golden novelist turned newspaper critic, Sebastian Cruttwell, and his Estonian wife, Lydia, a concentration camp survivor, is haunted by the spectre of death and regret. Like all Rattigan's plays it is a marvel of deceit and concealment. Here, Lydia's fatal illness and the inability of either partner to reveal the truth about it is turned into a dance of death, neatly stepped by protagonists who employ the skills they learned as a former British intelligence officer and a resistance worker on their own 30-year marriage.
Although the evening offers some pleasures - chiefly in Michael Thomas's superb performance as the crusty Cruttwell, a pampered cat of a man who has turned emotional concealment into an art form - it remains more interesting for the light it sheds on Rattigan. Not only was he staring his own death in the face with this play, he was also trying to exorcise the demons of his relationship with his father. He also needed to prove he still had something to say in a theatre which, after 1956 and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, largely dismissed his work as old-fashioned.
But what the play, with its references to post-war politics and hippies, gains in social relevance it loses in emotional delicacy, and even director Philip Wilson, who has mined the subtext of Coward with such stiletto precision in the past, often can't breathe life into the stilted dialogue and awkward plotting. The result is an evening that often seems mawkish and emotionally lurid rather than subtly muted, although there are moments when Rattigan is recklessly self-revealing, such as when Cruttwell discovers that Plain Talk About Sex has been filed next to Peter Pan in his library.
· Until July 8. Box office: 01243 781312.
