Reviews

One doesn’t think of taboo-shattering dramas featuring wealthy, nattily attired men in suits, given that such landmarks tend to arrive in various states of undress accompanied by titles sticking a finger or two to the bourgeoisie (”Shopping and Fucking,” say). So it’s with some shock — though, given both the writing and Maria Aitken’s ice-cold production, not an iota of pathos — that one clocks the first-act finale of Terence Rattigan’s little-known “Man and Boy,” in which a stern-faced Romanian magnate pimps his own son to a gay American colleague.

“Man and Boy,” not surprisingly didn’t linger overly long upon its 1963 London premiere, in a production starring Charles Boyer, and, truth to tell, it’s hard to imagine the play setting the town alight four decades on. (The Duchess already has a followup tenant, Lindsay Posner’s revival of “The Birthday Party” starring Eileen Atkins and Henry Goodman, skedded for late April.)

Star David Suchet’s ability to cut an unwaveringly stern path across the course of nearly three hours, not even allowing himself the twinge of humanity granted Derek Jacobi’s comparably grim pater in “Don Carlos,” is admirable. But the cumulative effect of the play is to reel a bit from the calculation and cynicism of Rattigan’s purposefully, even pompously firm hand.

While the writing is full of exhortations along the lines of “never in the future let the truth make you cry,” the evening would actually be that bit more gripping if the playwright, like his central character Gregor Antonescu, let down his guard. That, alas, is not to be from an anti-hero for whom virtuousness is an affront. “I can at least cope with hatred,” Gregor snarls. “Love (is) a commodity I can least afford.”

Rattigan’s bequest has largely been one of decoding his sexual energies, so “Man and Boy” deserves credit for wearing its intentions on what might think of as a stiff upper sleeve. Barely has there been some uneasy banter about the possible homosexuality of Basil Anthony (a reedy Ben Silverstone), an Oxford-educated pianist living in a Greenwich Village basement apartment with American g.f. Carol (Jennifer Lee Jellicorse), before Suchet arrives, playing the father from whom Basil has long been estranged. And whom young Basil, on his 18th birthday, apparently tried to kill.

Are the two keen to make amends? What, you think Rattigan has morphed into Neil Simon, just because his play is set in 1934 New York? Guess again. With a serpentine cool, Gregor will do what it takes to shore up the financial freefall in which this industrialist extraordinaire now finds himself. (Among other things, he brought roads to Yugoslavia and electricity to Hungary: clearly a busy bee.)

And with his scarcely less suave “crown prince,” Sven Johnson (David Yelland), in fully complicit tow, that scheme involves pushing Gregor’s “too thin” son toward corporate fat cat Mark Herris (Colin Stinton), who has mistaken Basil as Gregor’s lover. How can we glean Herris’ interest? Because he speaks the necessary gnomic discourse, and Stinton brings the quiet pleasures of a slowly unfurling libido to rhetorical questions like, “Is what I’m thinking true?”

If “Man and Boy” rang true more often, it might be a genuine reclamation on the order of the Almeida’s “Deep Blue Sea,” directed by Karel Reisz in 1993, which remains London’s banner Rattigan revival of the past dozen years or more. Instead, one is all too aware of so deeply English a dramatist writing outside his immediate experience (if not his own apparent sexual demons). In a play in which hardly anyone is what he or she seems — a character introduced late on as the Countess (Helen Grace) turns out to be anything but — Rattigan seems to be trying on voices with varying degrees of success, as he attempts a reasonable discourse for both his American and Eastern European characters.

Too often, however, the language has an ungainly, cliche fit. Herris, for instance, says, “Don’t count your chickens,” in a bid to sound authentically Yankee, while Gregor’s outburst prior to the first-act curtain — he dismisses Herris as “a silly pink-faced old fairy” — says more about a dramatist’s apparent self-loathing than it does about a character whose vitriol is as monochromatic as the sentimental excesses against which this play rebels.

Still, jutting out amid a largely indifferent cast, Suchet’s eyebrows look especially fierce pressed into the service of a rabid capitalist who can’t abide feeling and regards emotions as indicative of a socialist-leaning son whose softness has made him weak.

Typically, it’s neither his wife nor his child who seems to excite Gregor in any way, but his aide-de-camp and fixer, Yelland’s smoothie of a Sven. What, pray tell, is that all about? Or must we wait for the sequel, “Man and Man”?

Terence Rattigan’s reputation had already gone into steep decline when Man and Boy was first presented in London in 1963. Its frosty reception and short run must have confirmed him in his sense that his sun had set, and virtually nothing has been heard of it since. But now, in a much more favourable climate, it is getting a West End revival, at the Duchess Theatre.

The setting is a dim basement apartment in Greenwich Village in the mid-1930s, the home of a young man who plays the piano in a local club. He calls himself Basil Anthony; in reality he is the son of a very powerful and very shady international financier called Gregor Antonescu. Five years ago, disgusted by what he had learned of his father’s misdeeds, he took a shot at him (not a very serious one) and fled. He hasn’t been in touch with him since.

Now Antonescu’s suave lieutenant Sven suddenly turns up, followed by the old man himself. The Antonescu empire is in serious trouble; a crucial deal with an American corporation is about to fall through, and Antonescu needs a hide-away where he can meet the head of the corporation, Ferris, and try to talk him round.

Along with his usual tricks, he has an extra card up his sleeve. He has found out that Ferris is secretly homosexual. When they meet, he implies that he is too, and that Basil - Ferris has no idea who he really is - is one of his lovers. He holds the boy out as bait, and steers Ferris in his direction.

It is an implausible plot, to say the least, but a curiously powerful one. Another dramatist would have made more of the political background - Basil is vaguely left-wing - but he wouldn’t necessarily have written a better play. Rattigan concentrates on what he does best, the criss-crossings of love and power in private life, and the result is enthralling. So is the central performance in Maria Aitken’s fine production. David Suchet’s Antonescu is an unforgettable portrait of a mega-crook - sly, manipulative, formidable, a lot more sympathetic than he has any right to be. There’s satisfying support, too, especially from David Yelland (Sven), Ben Silverstone (Basil) and Helen Grace, who is very amusing and brittle as Antonescu’s trophy wife.

When Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy opened in London in 1963, the once wildly successful but by then critically scorned dramatist fully believed that this might be his last throw of the theatrical dice.
Without redeeming qualities: David Suchet as the unscrupulous Antonescu

He had recently been diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia and he hoped against hope that this would be the great play to salvage a reputation that had taken a terrible battering since Look Back in Anger opened in 1956 and made his work seem like little more than well-crafted boulevard entertainment.

But, with one or two honourable exceptions - Bernard Levin among them - the reviewers put the boot in and the show flopped in the West End and on Broadway.

This is Man and Boy’s first major revival since that ill-fated première and, although the play is not in quite the same league as his greatest work, most notably The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version, it offers further proof that Rattigan belongs among the finest British dramatists of the 20th century.

Yes, its well-made construction now seems a little creaky; yes, at times the dialogue sounds a shrill and stagey note. But the play does two things that were always Rattigan’s special forte: it enthrals its audience for two and a half hours and it penetrates the sad mysteries of the human heart to expose the terrible damage that love can do.

The play is set, in 1934, in a squalid basement apartment in Greenwich Village, evocatively conjured in Simon Higlett’s design. We are in the home of Basil Anthony, the illegitimate son of a corrupt Romanian tycoon called Gregor Antonescu with whom he had a disastrous falling out five years earlier. Basil is earning a crust as a pianist in a nightclub and finding consolation in the arms of a loving American actress. Then his father turns up, in desperate trouble. The business is on the brink of ruin and his father faces almost certain disgrace.

But Antonescu senior is not a man to surrender without a fight. A merger could save his affairs and he has the dope on the president of the corporation that could save his hide. That president is homosexual and Antonescu passes off his son as his lover, freely hinting that he will make him available to his business partner should the deal go through.

On paper it sounds preposterous. On stage, watching the peerless David Suchet pimp his own son proves spellbinding. Antonescu is a villain in the Robert Maxwell mode and Suchet plays him to the manner born, charming one moment, brutal the next, his mind almost visibly racing as he contemplates the next move in his dastardly game.

Suchet has seized upon the essential quality of all great stage villains: that they always seem more alive, and hence more attractive, than anyone else in the play. The sheer energy of his performance, the daring insolence and bravura of his deceptions, prove irresistible, even though we know that Antonescu is a man without a single redeeming feature beyond his pluck.

But it is Ben Silverstone who provides the emotional core of the piece as the son who cannot stop loving the worthless father who has betrayed him. The sudden stammer he develops in his father’s presence, his desperate need for the affection he will never receive, are beautifully caught.

Maria Aitken directs a cracking production, with an especially fine support from David Yelland as Antonescu’s brilliantly suave henchman.

This time Man and Boy will surely prove the hit that Rattigan so desperately hoped for.

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Related Article: Is This Rattigan’s lost masterpiece?

David Suchet is part bull and part pixie. If you have seen him acting only in TV’s Poirot, you know only a fraction of what he can do. Like every great stage artist, he embodies a series of oxymorons. He has harsh charm, witty gravitas and deadly tenderness.

His performance as Gregor Antonescu in Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy gives London the rare luxury of observing a master in a role that releases his gifts. Antonescu is a character astonishingly like accounts of the late Robert Maxwell. He is described as the world’s greatest financier and the head of the world’s greatest charitable organisation (the play is set in 1934) but, before he even enters, we know that his empire is crashing and that he is on the run. He behaves like a mafioso and his son, in whose apartment the play occurs, has had nothing to do with him for five years. Not for some time do we see that Antonescu is hatching further plots of heartless manipulation around his son. This is, especially in act one, a gorgeously complex role: virtually a collage of multiple roles, all of which Suchet gathers up into one virtuoso sweep: father, fugitive, machinator, master-charmer, Machiavel.

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Is it coincidence or a response to something in the Zeitgeist? At the moment, you’ll notice that three of the most powerful productions in the West End focus on deeply troubled father-son relationships.

In Schiller’s Don Carlos at the Gielgud, the eponymous prince works himself into a froth trying to smash through his father’s almost fanatical distaste for him. In Festen at the Lyric, a son throws a swanky 60th-birthday celebration into disarray with an accusation of sexual abuse. He wants to know why his father systematically subjected him to it. “Because it’s all you were fit for,” is the chilling answer.

Now, the creepiest case of all is Maria Aitken’s intriguing revival of Man and Boy, Terence Rattigan’s controversial 1963 play (which was not, at that time, hailed as the key work he thought it). The elements are roughly the same: dominant, overbearing patriarch, and sensitive, sidelined son who is torn between contempt and a desperate desire for love. The devastating twist here is that Gregor Antonescu, the wealthy Romanian financier, is prepared to pass off his son as his gay toyboy and to dangle him as a quid pro quo to the covertly homosexual chairman of American Electric (the deliciously discomfited but dead keen Colin Stinton).

The son has been eager to create a good impression for his father, whose imperiled empire hangs on this merger. But Gregor blithely neglects to tell the boy of the crucial detail. That’s the degree to which, for power, he’s willing to degrade the filial relationship.

Set in the estranged son’s Greenwich Village apartment on a July night in 1934, this flawed but compelling drama offers a mighty, meaty role for a leading actor, and David Suchet is magnificent in it. With his dark, opulent voice and the measured private amusement of his seductive ploys, he mesmerically incarnates a man for whom other people are merely instruments. There are some amusing moments when, apparently conversing with his son (the excellent, painfully needy and beautiful Ben Silverstone) or to his financial heir-apparent (David Yelland) he seems to come round with a start, as if to say: “What, are you still here?” The silky stealth with which he plays on his son’s affection while dressing him up in sexy Bohemian clothes leaves you feeling both soiled and unsettlingly impressed. This cannibal has a witty way with a napkin.

It’s great that Rattigan steadfastly refuses to sentimentalise his monster (who, in some aspects, resembles Robert Maxwell) because of the abject poverty of the man’s childhood. Instead, he presents him as someone who has chosen power rather than love (the good his work has brought about - roads in Romania, electricity in Hungary - was incidental to his real project). Suchet manages to convey both the darkly gleeful way that this leaves Gregor free to deploy a travesty of tragic feeling, and the empty tragic waste of it all.

The play creaks a bit and shows its age by ruling out the slightest possibility that there could be tremors of sexual attraction between a non-homosexual father and his straight son. But it is well worth seeing.

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