RATTIGAN SEASON
Nijinsky
South Downs
Chichester Festival Theatre
03.09.11
Enterprisingly, Chichester have
included two new plays in their Rattigan anniversary season.
Nicholas Wright's “Rattigan's
Nijinksy” takes the abandoned screenplay, commissioned by the BBC,
about impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his “creation” Nijinsky,
and weaves through and around it his imagined back-story. Thus giving
us two world premières in one. While David Hare's South Downs,
written to complement The Browning Version, shows us the coming of
age of a solitary child unhappily immured in a Public School in the
early sixties.
Malcolm Sinclair is cornering the
market in insecure inverts of genius. Hard on the heels of his
buttoned-up Britten in The Habit of Art, here we see him as Rattigan,
not quite so repressed, perhaps, but still aghast at being outed and
labelled a queer writer. These two men both knew they were dying
[they died in fact within a year of each other], both hoped their
swan song would say something of the love that dared not speak its
name.
Philip Frank's stylish production
skilfully interweaves the two stories, helped by a versatile company
which sees Jonathan Hyde triumphantly pull off the unlikely double of
the flamboyant Diaghilev and the straight-talking BBC producer Cedric
Messina, and Susan Tracy on glorious form as the dancer's determined
widow, and Rattigan's redoubtable mother Vera. Nijinsky himself was
played with passionate intensity by a diminutive Joseph Drake; this
too was doubled, in a brilliant device, with the bell-hop at
Claridges – a very Bennett character this – who, in a poignantly
downbeat ending, shares his passion for cricket with the great
writer, and companionably slips between the covers.
An agreeably surreal atmosphere is
created by having dancers, party-goers and passengers invade the
carpeted hush of Rattigan's hotel suite. A favourite moment –
action on board the liner to Buenos Aires – when Mrs R, strolling
past on the captain's arm, tartly reminds Messina - “I've been dead
and buried for three years – you should know that!”
David Hare's unsettling atmospheric
memoir of Lancing in the 60s is both an éducation sentimentale
and an éducation spirituelle. And
a largely autobiographical piece – Hare's father too was often
absent at sea, Hare's Scottish mother a passionate believer in the
power of education. John
Blakemore, played with a wonderfully controlled emotional and
intellectual depth by Alex Lawther, loses his only close friend [an
equally impressive Bradley Hall] and his Anglo-Catholic faith. In a
richly symbolic narrative, we watch him see the object of his worship
from afar [the actress mother of his house prefect] become flesh and
blood in a eucharist of Fortnum's fruit cake. His dialogues with
staff - “precocity and insolence” - and with his peers, sharing
confidences, milk and a clandestine cigarette, were absolutely
believable. Jonathan Bailey caught the easy confidence of the
“incendiary” revolutionary prefect who can't wait to escape with
his air hostess from Hove, and the excellent quartet of younger boys
was completed by Jack Elliott and Liam Morton [Taplow in The Browning
Version]. This is the world, with its arcane rules and its love of
ritual, of Anderson's “If...”, and, less seriously, Bennett's
Albion House. Fifty years on it's hard to recapture, and I thought
that the boys managed it rather better than the masters, though
Andrew Woodall's English teacher, teaching Pope with a mixture of
bullying and sarcasm, was interestingly written, and I liked the
pyjama-clad confirmation class, where the chaplain who alludes
meaningfully to his “thing of darkness” was nicely done by
Nicholas Farrell [a movingly desiccated Crocker-Harris in the
Rattigan]. Belinda Duffield, who brings the cake and teaches
Blakemore what “dissembling” means, was superbly played by Anna
Chancellor, who also gave us a memorably poisonous Millie
Crocker-Harris. “Inconsequential” overheard on the way out over
the parquet to the interval drinks. I can't agree. Yes, the ending
was less powerful than the intriguing opening moments, but we were
left feeling we had seen a young life changed for ever.
Two
pedantic foot-notes. I was worried that the lonely boy spoke of “Mum”
instead of “Mummy”, or even “Mater”, before I realised that
this could well be a shibboleth for the child from a semi-detached.
And in the sixties, we sang “Him serve with fear, his praise
forth tell”. The mealy-mouthed amendment says much of changing
attitudes to the Deity, to religion, and indeed to Masters and to
education.
