Reviews

The Daily Telegraph

I find myself in a quandary with this review. When Chichester’s production of Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece The Browning Version opened last year in a double-bill with David Hare’s new play, South Downs, also set in an English public school, I gave it a rave review and five stars.

Seeing it again on its transfer to the West End, it strikes me as an even greater achievement than it did then. The performances in both pieces seem deeper and more moving, the sense of English decency and reserve even more affecting. But I cannot go higher than five stars, so you will just have to imagine an extra tick in the margin.

We think of Hare principally as an often indignant Left-wing playwright. But there is a rare tenderness about South Downs, and a sense that the troubled leading character, an unhappy, highly intelligent 14-year-old boy, is a self-portrait of Hare in his youth, which lends this play a moving resonance and depth.

Like The Browning Version, South Downs – set in 1962 in a school that resembles Hare’s alma mater, Lancing – turns on an act of kindness. His young central character, John Blakemore, is earnest, lonely and regarded with suspicion by the other boys. And then the mother of one of the prefects gives him tea, cake and sympathy, along with some sound advice, and the flooding tide of his misery at last begins to recede.

The piece is beautifully directed by Jeremy Herrin, who captures the rituals, the hymns, and the routine cruelties of boarding school life with superb precision. And there are especially fine performances from the teenage actor Alex Lawther as the painfully vulnerable Blakemore, Anna Chancellor as the wise, kind-hearted mother and hilarious turns from Andrew Woodall as a sarky English teacher.

If South Downs is a very good play, The Browning Version (1948) is an indisputably great one, and I have never seen it better staged than it is here by Angus Jackson. While Hare’s play focuses on a schoolboy, Rattigan explores the life of a desiccated classics master, Andrew Crocker-Harris, who is retiring early because of ill-health. In the course of the play he is subjected to terrible humiliations, both personal and professional, and when a pupil, in a casual act of kindness, gives him a leaving present, it sets off an emotional reaction that feels cataclysmic.

Nicholas Farrell’s performance is extraordinary in its depth of pent-up pain, and when the emotional damn finally cracks, the effect is devastating. What’s equally moving, though, is that Farrell also shows how “the Crock” recovers himself, and somehow finds the strength to go on with a mixture of heroic honesty and dogged courage.

There is wonderful support from Anna Chancellor as Millie, his cruel, philandering but not entirely despicable wife, Mark Umbers as her discomfited lover, Liam Morton as the kindly schoolboy and Andrew Woodall as the vile headmaster.

If you can sit through this play dry-eyed you must be made of steel.

Evening Standard

 

The Independent

David Hare and Terence Rattigan have a lot in common, apart from their public schools and knighthoods.

They write about pain, stoicism and, in these plays, they also write about pupils and teachers in the context of the classical touchstones of Alexander Pope and Aeschylus; intellectual integrity and domestic tragedy.

With Hare’s smartness and edginess and Rattigan’s cool, insistent  humanity, you'd be hard pushed to concoct a more ideal, or more rewarding, West End double act of literate drama (to add to the other current “quality” offerings of Michael Frayn, Richard Bean and David Edgar).

In South Downs, Hare’s surrogate, John Blakemore, brilliantly played by newcomer Alex Lawther, is cursed by his own cleverness, and drawn to the most popular, worldly boy in the school, whose mother, an actress (Anna Chancellor), comes to his rescue with tea and cake and sympathy; she’s appearing in a nondescript comedy, “Uncle Says No,” and he’s a fan.

The parallel act of kindness in The Browning Version is less interventionist, but equally profound. The punished mimic, Taplow, surprisingly played by Liam Morton as a podgy, over-age loser, gives his retiring housemaster, Andrew Crocker-Harris, a copy of Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.

The text has been Taplow’s nemesis, but also echoes the Clytemnestra-like carrying on of Crocker-Harris’s disappointed wife, Millie (Chancellor again, adding mischief to misery), with the science master (Mark Umbers), just as Hare uses the Pope lesson, and the very funny confirmation class, to explore the boys’ spirituality.

Put together in this way – Hare responded to a commission by the Terence Rattigan estate to find a better pairing for The Browning Version than the backstage farce Harlequinade, now rendered superfluous by Frayn’s Noises Off  – you get a composite picture of post-war public school life that alarms and satisfies in equal measure.

Nicholas Farrell as a heart-breakingly pent-up Crocker-Harris, “the Himmler of the Lower Fifth,” has to cope with his wife’s infidelities, the boys’ scorn and the humiliation of his dismissal.

There’s a scene of genius when the next, newly-wed incumbents of the Crocker-Harris job and flat pay a call and suggest their own rocky path ahead. They’re squabbling before they’ve even crossed the threshold.

Similarly, Hare can summon Pope’s rigour as a poet to describe the value of cages in allowing us to feel free. There’s a sense of life stretching dismally ahead in both plays, even as the bell rings for dinner, or chapel, or prep.