Cause Célèbre

Terence Rattigan’s last play is also one of his best and one of his most uncharacteristic. Uncharacteristic because it is not domestic and it’s not linear; it’s a dizzying, brutal, time-and-place-jumping, epic piece of work. He’d done a few more epic pieces before - Adventure Story, Ross, Bequest to the Nation - but this is far more effective than those.

The play concerns the true story of Alma Rattenbury who was discovered one night in 1935 standing above the brutally battered body of her husband. During the trial it was revealed that she’d taken a younger lover and both she and her lover initially claimed to have done the deed. Eventually she cracked and claimed her innocence. To a public outcry, she was found not guilty, whereupon she took herself off to a field by a river and stabbed herself three times in the heart. The play is, as so often, about forbidden desire and the British resistance to it. He parallels it with a fictional story of the forewoman of the jury who dislikes sex, has a son who is desperately pursuing it, and a husband who wants her back. She begins by sharing in the mob’s hatred of Alma and her lust but ends up understanding, though losing much.

This is not a good production. There are good things; the second half is much better than the first as the barristers camp it about most enjoyably in the courtroom scenes; Anne-Marie Duff is rather effective as Alma, both innocent and flirtatious, flippant and hurting. But otherwise, the play doesn’t work. Mainly the fault is the building; the Old Vic is so huge that the actors are all turning out and bellowing. It ruins the distinction between the shabby domestic scenes and the grand theatre of the courtroom - and that distinctions is part of the point. And the set and lights by Hildegard Bechtler and Bruno Poet just don’t work at all; visually, the stage is all so dark and drab, which means that we get no distinction between indoors and outdoors, past and present, night and day. It all looks dark and the grimness is flagged up for us. Bechtler’s sets tend towards the monumental and this has a rising and falling ceiling that may, for all I know, be intended to suggest the crushing judgementalism of an unforgiving world, but made everything look machine-like and soulless and this is a play with a lot of soul. The final scene, by the riverbank, should be pastoral and beautiful in horrible contrast to her suicide but in rich amplification of her simple mantra: ‘What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it’. Instead it was bleak, hollow, dark and stagey.

I liked Niamh Cusack as the jurywoman; she had a brittle sexuality about her - much better than playing her as prim and stuck-up. This was an earthy woman and her feeling for her son was very believable. But the son - in fact both the sons in the play - were much too old and much too priggish. I’d accept this is partly in the writing but surely you can get eleven-year-olds who look eleven? The father never seemed sexual, just sententious.

I’m spoiled, of course, because I still remember so vividly Neil Bartlett’s luminous production at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1998. That one was fluid, roguish, sexy and camp; light in a way and then crushingly sad. It’s good to see a production of this play but this won’t have helped its - or Rattigan’s - reputation. This is Rattigan’s most experimental work; it came over last night as his stodgiest.