After the Dance

My God, this is good. It’s a tremendously sure-footed production that, in my view, pushes the play not just to the front rank of Rattigan’s plays but to the front rank of British plays in the twentieth century.

After the Dance, as is well-known, was only a modest success in 1939 and so excluded by Rattigan from his Collected Plays and not reprinted until 1995, the edition that I edited for Nick Hern. It was produced in a televised version in the early nineties and the Oxford Stage Company produced it within the last decade, though the production didn’t come into London. I saw a drama school production of the play in around 2002, but otherwise the play has been neglected in this country until now.

What Thea Sharrock and her superb cast have completely understood is that Rattigan is undoubtedly an upper-middle class voice but this does not equate either to his values or the strangulated cut-glass accents that actors sometimes effect, which preserve the play in aspic, as a fantasy of someone’s nostalgia, and kill it dead as any sort of comment on the present time.

And of course, it is the most remarkably political play he wrote. The play is in many ways a savage assault on the values of a trivial generation who sleepwalked towards a second World War. The third act, in particular, show the clouds of war gathering over the stage and, despite to onset of spring, the play is decidedly wintry.

That said, it is also very funny, much funnier, indeed, than I had ever realised. The star comic turn is the character of John Reid, the wastrel, drunk, self confessed ‘parasite’ and ‘court jester’ to the Scott-Fowlers. He is the most unapologetic embodiment of the bright young generation, in all its failures. He is its most successful advocate, just as Peter, the cuckolded lover, is its bitterest, most nihilistic critic. John is played sensationally by Adrian Scarborough; it’s hard to imagine this being bettered, especially in the superb sequence where he discusses the Scott-Fowlers’ divorce and fantasises about living for six months in London and six months in the South of France.

The production effortlessly makes the sharp transitions that are so striking about the play, from comedy to romantic intrigue, from farce to tragedy, from wisecracking laughter to bitter political commentary. Housed in a gorgeous and typically monumental set by Hildegard Bechtler, the room, with only it seems cosmetic changes transforms in mood very dramatically.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll make a superb central pairing. Carroll plays Joan as larkish, carefree, riv en with frozen feeling, and trapped, utterly trapped, in a misrecognition of her lover’s feelings. Benedict Cumberbatch has a difficult job, dumping two women, driving one to suicide, yet still keeping our sympathies. He is a witty presence at the beginning, by the end a wild and desperate figure, doomed to loneliness, too late aware of the love that passed him by.

I was very struck how much this is a rehearsal for The Deep Blue Sea: the suicidal woman, the lively sense of a world around the room, the central figure ending the play alone, the social fools, condemning themselves out of their own mouths. The Deep Blue Sea is perhaps more perfect, more finely wrought in its single pursuit of a woman’s battle with loss, but it’s clear that it was the failure of this play that meant he would wait over a decade to try anything like it again.

By then, of course, he has stripped the well-made play of its less useful trappings. If After the Dance has faults, it’s that some of the transitions are a bit sharp; David falling for Helen’s advances is a big ask, almost as big as how quickly he is persuaded to give her up. John becomes the raisonneur figure in Act III rather uncomfortably and even this exemplary production couldn’t avoid him becoming a little sententious. In The Deep Blue Sea, he cleverly makes this figure the Eastern European doctor and his advice is more finely poised between triumph and disaster; here, you feel that it’s just a perverse decision of John to announce the truth. In the later play, he is forcing a woman on the point of suicide to confront the truth of her life, knowing that she might draw back or rush forward all the more decidedly.

I am so glad to have seen this play. And what a dream to have seen such a blistering production.