Love in Idleness is second division Rattigan, a 1944 rewriting of Less Than Kind. Trevor Nunn offers a hybrid of the scripts (to preserve the political grist of the first) and directs with verve. Rattigan was such a master craftsman that, even with an uneven play (its creakiest timbers are in the third act), there are many plotted pleasures and the first act is a triumph of squirm-making comedy.
Eve Best plays Olivia Brown, a widow living in sin with Sir John Fletcher, cabinet minister. When Michael, her 17-year-old son (evacuated during the war), returns, she says: “He is rather a lamb, isn’t he?” Actually – hilariously – he is an insufferable brute. But he may be right to disapprove of Fletcher (“a stinking reactionary”). He is beside himself when he realises his mother and the minister are lovers – and that he is in Fletcher’s house. (I love his aggressively random inquiry to his prospective stepfather: “Did you pay for the weighing machine in the bathroom?”) Edward Bluemel is spot on as Michael and Anthony Head smoothly convincing as Fletcher. Helen George plays Fletcher’s minx of a wife with pert attitude. Newsreel footage frames the action well. But it’s the superlative Best who makes the evening unmissable: flirtatious, restless and deeper than she lets on.
