In Praise of Love at Orange Tree Theatre – review

In Praise of Love was Terence Rattigan’s penultimate play, premiered in 1973, and watching this revival, you can see why it hasn’t become quite as regularly performed as The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version.

Yet its theme is remarkably close to that of those two cast-iron classics: the English curse of being unable to admit emotion, and the warping unhappiness this tendency to secrecy can cause.

It was loosely inspired by the relationship between Rattigan’s friends Rex Harrison (now most famous for My Fair Lady) and Kaye Kendall (a British actress of considerable sophistication and wit). Staying with them in Beverly Hills, Rattigan was struck by Harrison’s offhand manner towards a woman with whom he had supposedly been passionately in love. Only later did he realise that it was Harrison’s way of coping with her terminal illness, which had been revealed – astoundingly – to him, but not to her.

From this notion of powerful love concealed by indifference, Rattigan weaves an intricate chamber piece centring on Sebastian (Dominic Rowan), a Marxist critic for a Sunday newspaper, and his Estonian wife Lydia (Claire Price), whom he met in the war when he was an intelligence officer and she was a refugee who had survived a concentration camp. She knows she is gravely sick but is hiding it from Sebastian. He knows she is dying but doesn’t tell her.

They have a son, Joey (Joe Edgar), an aspiring playwright who is campaigning in a by-election for the Liberal party, which earns him his father’s contempt. “A vote-splitting organisation carefully designed to keep the establishment in power.” The quartet is completed by Mark (Daniel Abelson), a successful American novelist, friend to Sebastian (who treats him cruelly), and openly in love with Lydia.

The themes of the play are beautifully held in tension; it’s both full of rich expressions of feeling and of a kind of despair at the passivity and hopelessness of 1970s life, which echoes John Osborne’s dyspeptic view of the British – and feels rather more surprising coming from Rattigan.

Its challenge lies in its tone. Rattigan apparently did not like Harrison’s own performance of a character based on him when the play opened on Broadway, feeling it too charming. But if you play Sebastian in all his brutish solipsism and unthinking misogyny – ordering Lydia around and seemingly displaying no sympathy for her – then he comes over as an uninteresting bully.

That happens here. By the time Rowan’s Sebastian wins our sympathy with his desperate declaration of love and need at the close of the play, he has long forfeited much claim to it. Amelia Sears’ direction is similarly emphatic; even in the tight confines of the Orange Tree, where Peter Butler’s set deftly conjures the sense of a comfortable 1970s home, it seems as if the characters are all semaphoring at each other too strongly.

It’s left to Edgar, in a gracefully understated performance as Joey, to bring the emotional punch, finding exactly the right tone of wryness and irony to convey his deep hurt as his father at first betrays him – and then redeems himself.