A very ‘well made’ production.
Summer 1954 - two one Act Rattigan’s (Table Number Seven from Separate Tables, and The Browning Version) show the master of the ‘well made’ play at his finest, with an ensemble cast including Nathaniel Parker, Siân Phillips and Lolita Chakrabarti.
This is a touring production (starting at The Theatre Royal, Bath in 2024), spending only a week at the Richmond Theatre, and we are lucky that such productions still exist. Interestingly Table Number Seven is shown in a version not allowed by the then Lord Chamberlain in its first (and indeed many subsequent) UK production(s). This version makes a great deal more sense than the one allowed originally. And is thus even more touching in its conclusion.
The year 1954 marks close to the end of the heyday of simply constructed well-made plays, when the audience could sit back to be entertained (which included being moved) without having to ask what it was all about. Osborne, Becket, Pinter, Orton are rather more than just hovering in the wings, and it took many years for Rattigan’s well-made plays to start to be revived (though it should be noted that Rattigan, despite apparently despairing of the change in playwriting norms, invested in Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane for its West End transfer).
Although we are increasingly used to plays without intervals (this has one) real one act plays are now a rarity, requiring much tauter scripting and characterisation. The playwright has no time to lose in hitting all the notes he (or of course she, and Chakrabarti is herself a playwright) wants, to make their dramatic point.
A cast headed up by Nathaniel Parker, Siân Phillips and Lolita Chakrabarti is quite heavy hitting, and Parker ‘stars’ in both plays, the characters equally, but differently, flawed, with Chakrabarti opposite him playing two very different characters, one wholly sympathetic the other distinctly not.
Siân Phillips appears only in the first play, but is magnificent in her malignity.
The set(s) are on revolves, used sparingly but well and allowing seamless set changes in each play, and the direction is perfect in being wholly unnoticeable, which apparently naturalistic plays need – the characters move and act naturally and without artifice and yet are always just in the right place, doing the right things, at the right moment. Which allows disbelief (no plots are actually believable, if they were they would bore) to be fully suspended.
The production goes next to Cheltenham and then Oxford, closing mid-February if you can’t get to Richmond this week.