In this late-career play from 1973 Terence Rattigan makes a case for the reserve and repression that had rendered his earlier work unfashionable, his theatrical reputation having been trampled by the boorish, noisy Angry Young Men of the 1950s. In Praise of Love is a portrait of a marriage in which literary critic Sebastian (Dominic Rowan) and his Estonian wife Lydia (Claire Price) hide their deeper feelings from each other in the face of terminal illness.
It’s a typically well-crafted work with a core of real warmth, though studded with the cliches of the age. Three of the four characters suck down almost a bottle of spirits each as a pre-dinner sharpener and there is a lot of hectoring talk about politics - Sebastian is a champagne Marxist. The story is loosely based on the marriage of actors Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall, and those who remember Harrison will hear echoes of his peremptory impatience in Sebastian’s lines. Director Amelia Sears finds her way unerringly to the heart of the piece through all the layers of tricksy comedy and artifice.
At first sight Sebastian is, as he later describes himself, “an uncaring shit”, and a hopeless one at that. He requires Lydia to do everything for him, from switching on a lamp to cooking his dinner. Her affectionate compliance is met with cantankerous exasperation. He bans her from telling “refugee stories” to their successful novelist friend Mark (Daniel Abelson) and delights in the knowledge that Mark remains thwartedly in love with her.
Slowly it emerges that Lydia was a teenage resistance fighter in World War Two, who survived a mass-execution, more than one concentration camp and enforced sex work under the Nazis and the Russians. Sebastian, then a young intelligence officer, married her to save her: love developed later.
Now here they are 28 years on, with a 20-year-old son, Joey (Joe Edgar), an aspiring TV writer and political centrist who adores his mother and clashes with his father. Sickness intrudes in the shape of doctors’ reports and popped pills, but the symptoms and the diagnoses are deliberately falsified on all sides.
At the heart of the play is the way non-communication passes down the generations. How will the remaining members of the family find an accommodation when the person who mediated between them has gone? A chess game becomes a metaphor.
Rowan, always good at playing arrogant rotters, is absolutely unsparing in his portrayal of Sebastian, a man whose socialist principles rest on a bed of privilege, and whose actions remain unforgiveable even as they become understandable. Price is terrific in a part that’s almost impossible: Lydia is a bright, brisk, heavily-accented ray of sunshine, endlessly loving and giving, even going so far as to encourage her successor in the marital bed.
Abelson is fine in the underwritten part of the suavely moustachioed Mark and Edgar nicely understated as Joey. Peter Butler’s set recalls Rachel Whiteread’s cast sculptures in its recreation of a bookish living room, and is full of nice 1970s touches, right down to the avocado prawn canapes. With this, and The Deep Blue Sea at the Haymarket, London is undergoing a mini Rattigan revival. And it turns out that’s no bad thing.
To 5 July, orangetreetheatre.co.uk.
