The Peter Hall Company summer season at Bath almost always includes a revival of a rarely performed English post-war classic and this time it is Terence Rattigan’s miniature masterpiece of restraint and suppressed emotion, set in an English public school on the last day of an unpopular classics master.
In the wrong hands, this could emerge as the sort of dry as dust period piece, all clipped vowels and sterile characters, that eventually sparked the John Osborne-led counter-revolution of kitchen sink drama. However, director Peter Hall and actor Peter Bowles present it as a subtle, devastating play, rich and raw with heart-rending pathos, yet not totally without hope at the final curtain. Bowles manages to imbue virtually every line with dignified self-loathing as the retiring teacher, who realises he has been a failure in both his career and marriage, yet finds some sort of redemption through one boy’s simple act of kindness.
Rattigan’s other characters are no mere stereotypes either, with Candida Gubbins and Charles Edwards contrasting the bitterness of the unfaithful wife against the eventual noble deed of her lover, and James Musgrave making Taplow the typical eager schoolboy.
Programmed alongside the Rattigan piece is Anton Chekhov’s mirroring one-act play Swansong, in which Bowles again excels as another failed professional, an elderly actor who relives his theatrical highlights to his stage prompt, played by James Laurenson, after his final performance in a dingy provincial theatre.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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