Summer 1954 review – Rattigan double bill packs an intellectual and emotional punch
Director James Dacre presents these two short dramas by Terence Rattigan under the banner title Summer 1954, the date when the action is set. Table Number Seven takes place in a Bournemouth boarding house inhabited by long-term residents whose incomes no longer cover the expenses of running their own homes. The action of The Browning Version (twice reworked into film – in 1951 with Michael Redgrave and in 1994 with Albert Finney and Greta Scacchi) takes place in the private rooms of a soon-to-retire classics teacher in a public school in the south of England.
Dacre cleverly sets both plays on a revolve stage, shifting our viewpoints and creating a physical exteriorisation of the drama’s interior dynamics. Mike Britton’s period design opens up to us the spaces inhabited by the characters as they react to events that cause them to question their perspectives – social, moral, emotional. Presentation and performance, from a well-balanced ensemble, wind us into the dramas.
In both plays, the central characters – bonhomous fraud “Major” Pollock; stickler-for-the-rules classics master Crocker-Harris, AKA “the Crock” – are seemingly weak, past their prime and painfully conscious of their own failings (Nathaniel Parker exceptional in both roles). Each has developed a carapace to cover his true emotions. Each is confronted with implacable forces – of prejudice, of ignorance, of smug self-satisfaction (given intricate reality in the form of the surrounding characters – notably Siân Phillips’s vicious Mrs Railton-Bell). At a moment of crisis, each is challenged to choose whether to continue their half-life or to dare to change.
These productions convey the intellectually astute and emotionally searing spirit of Rattigan’s writing, which, through close observation of particular behaviour, communicates eternal states. Here, a local newspaper report sets off the same range of reactions as an internet sensation; failure to understand that there are different kinds of love warps lives. Dacre’s Summer 1954 delivers thought-provoking plays for today.
