In Praise of Love review, Theatre Royal Bath: praiseworthy revival of Rattigan's daring comedy about death
With “In Praise of Love” (1973), Terence Rattigan daringly attempted – in his twilight years – a comedy about death. He had been diagnosed with terminal leukaemia (in the event the final curtain fell, in Bermuda, in 1977). A sense of his mortality lurks beneath this almost-swansong.
Yet his penultimate play is informed as much by oblique biography as sly self-portraiture. Rattigan was inspired by the affecting example of discreet devotion shown by Rex Harrison towards his wife Kay Kendall – whose leukaemia diagnosis was kept from her. In that stiff-upper-lip pretence, one hell of a performance by one actor for another, the playwright saw the potential for pathos and mirth. And he ran with the idea, right into the hippy era when “love” was all around but the “English vice” – as he saw it – of “reticence” lingered on.
Although Harrison nobly starred as the protagonist Sebastian Cruttwell on Broadway a year after the London premiere, he was hardly playing himself. The protective husband became a one-time intelligence officer and short-lived hit novelist turned crabby book critic and a hoary Marxist to boot, railing against centre-ground Liberalism as embodied by his young (up-and-coming) playwright son. Doubling the psychological complexity, Rattigan made the wife – here an Estonian refugee called Lydia – aware of her illness and resolved to spare her spouse and her son the bad news.
It’s a tough one to pull off: surface levity versus subcutaneous anguish. Boasting the starry casting of Robert Lindsay and Tara Fitzgerald, Jonathan Church’s revival, concluding his fine Bath summer season with an autumnal flourish, intrigues, entertains and stirs without being fully knock ’em dead.
He can’t quite disguise the dustier exposition and a visiting American friend (Julian Wadham’s Mark), a novelist of usefully contrasting success and a handy shoulder to cry on (suffering his own pangs of unrequited affection), is required to listen so patiently he should charge by the hour.
Fitzgerald treats us to a languid poise, pallid charm and intense gaze. If she never seems wholly at ease amid the book-lined clutter, that serves the scenario. She holds the accent well, but it’s as if she’s carrying a loaded drinks tray – you can’t help noticing the balancing act. Still, she has you welling up at the forlorn final tableau.
Maybe it’s all those years on the sitcom My Family, but Lindsay has the manner of the self-preoccupied man of the house down to a fine art. His testiness is a comic delight, but in the subtlest darting looks, you glimpse the melancholy beneath the brusque, chauvinist exterior. A second-half speech, outlining the horrors that Lydia and her Estonian compatriots suffered in the Second World War, is delivered to perfection. Is this, as the critic Harold Hobson once declared “the most piercing exposition of love under great stress that I have ever seen on the stage”? Not to my eyes, it isn’t. All the same, it’s eminently praiseworthy.
Until Nov 3. Tickets: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk
