‘As evil as Iago’: The shocking return of Terence Rattigan’s man and boy | stage

I I heard on the grapevine that it is planning to name the London West End theater after Terence Rattigan pauses. The best way to honor Rattigan is to revive his plays, the latest of which is the rarely seen Man and Boy, which opens at the National Dorfman Theater at the end of this month. The play ran briefly on Broadway and in London in 1963 with Charles Boyer in the lead, and in another outing in 2005 with David Suchet giving a charming performance as the “man” of the title, an embattled Roman financier, but to all intents and purposes this unknown Rattigan.

I would suggest that it reveals a surprising amount about its author. The first thing that should be noted is how important the success or failure of the play is to Ratigan himself. It was sparked by a book about the con man Swedish financier Ivar Kruger, whose business empire collapsed at the height of the Great Depression. Set in 1934, Rattigan finds its hero, Gregor Antonescu, hiding out in his estranged son’s apartment in Greenwich Village, luring the American Electric chair in hopes of securing a life-saving merger. What is shocking is the cruelty with which Gregor exploits his son’s sexual charms.

Equally surprising is Rattigan’s usually diplomatic belief that the play should be performed on his own terms or not at all. To him, Gregor is “as evil as Iago”, and when the play’s intended star, Rex Harrison, and director Glen Byam Shaw, sought to water down the script and Laurence Olivier rejected the play for Chichester’s inaugural season, Rattigan stood his ground. The play was of great importance to Rattigan, because with his theatrical reputation at an all-time low thanks to the emergence of a new generation at the royal court, he felt it was his last chance to prove that he was serious. dramatist.

But there are more personal reasons behind Rattigan’s emotional investment. At its heart, the play is a father-son drama, and you only have to read the excellent biographies by Michael Darlow and Geoffrey Wansel to realize how important his paternal relationship was to Rattigan’s life and work. His father, Frank, was a career diplomat who was forced to resign after an affair with a Roman princess: the antithesis of his father in many ways, Rattigan inherited his talent for pretense and belief in convincing emotion.

But he also used his work to explore the complexities of their relationship. He said of the adventure story, his play about Alexander the Great, that “the physical energy, strategic intelligence and determination of the hero were inspired by the love of his father.” Conversely, in Who is Sylvia? — written a year later, in 1950 — The sexually voracious hero who remains resolutely married is a thinly disguised portrait of the philandering Frank. By the time we reach Man and Boy, Rattigan has been basing the entire work on a tangled father-son relationship full of social and political antagonism and interdependence.

Another thread running through the play is the theme of homosexuality, and it is surprising how often Rattigan, the most reticent of men in terms of sexual disclosure, returns to the subject. David Hare once convinced me that Crocker Harris, the school hero in Rattigan’s novel “The Browning Version,” is a cleverly manipulative character who always ends up with his wife’s lovers. Ratigan’s Alexander the Great has an implicitly homosexual relationship with his close friend Hephaestion. At Table Seven, the second half of the separate tables, the residents of a private hotel gather to defend a false major accused of sexual harassment. Initially couched in opposite terms, the major’s slip was clearly a metaphor for country house living, and it is to Rattigan’s great credit that in 1954, three years before the Wolfenden Report declared that ‘homosexual conduct between consenting adults in private should not be regarded as a criminal offence’, he saw a shift in public attitudes.

But while it was clear that the man and boy were of great importance to Ratigan, do they matter to us? The public will judge for themselves, but it’s hard not to see hints of more recent scandals in it. One certainly thinks of Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born media mogul who embezzled the Mirror newspaper’s pension fund and who died under mysterious circumstances. His daughter, Ghislaine, was an associate of American financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex offender.

Gregor’s sins in Rattigan’s play are of lesser order, but although he is heartless, exploitative, and deceitful, he has the dynamism and drive that make him – unlike Lambert le Roux in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda – theatrically compelling. Rattigan grasped the drama’s central paradox: that we are fascinated by monsters so long as they embody William Blake’s dictum that “Energy is eternal delight.”