Review: Summer 1954 - Oxford Playhouse

The new title of Summer 1954 covers the revival of two very popular one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, a darling of British theatre in the mid-20th century but one who fell out of fashion with the arrival of so-called “kitchen sink” dramatists like John Osborne.

The title date suggests that we’re on the brink of that theatrical revolution. (Osborne’s Look Back in Anger opened in 1956.) The evening begins with Table Number Seven, set in a genteel Bournemouth hotel. The most important permanent residents are the no-nonsense Mrs Railton-Bell – played by imperious 90-year-old Sian Phillips – and bufferish retired Major Pollock (an understated Nathaniel Parker).

Straightaway the audience wonders why the Major is so desperate to lay hands on the weekly local paper and, if possible, keep it away from the other guests. The paper contains a court report of the Major “importuning on the esplanade” in the stilted language of the time.

Of course Mrs Railton-Bell noses out the report and, with a disgusted relish, attempts to get the Major expelled. But things don’t go entirely to her plan. Whatever the law and prejudice may say about homosexual behaviour, the middle-class occupants of the hotel, both young and old, are a more tolerant and complicated bunch than she’d counted on. That extends to her daughter, the downtrodden Sybil (Alexandra Dowling), whose drab life is lightened only by her friendship with the Major. There is real tension as we wait to see whether the daughter will finally rebel against the mother’s demands.

Table Number Seven is an immaculately constructed, insightful and moving piece of theatre. The second half offers The Browning Version, perhaps Rattigan’s best-known play. Traditional – very traditional – schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris, the “Croc”, again played by Nathaniel Parker, is about to retire. His life seems to have been a failure. He is despised by his wife Millie (Lolita Chakrabarti) who is having an affair with one of his colleagues. A half-humorous reference to him as “the Himmler of the lower fifth” is deeply hurtful.

So he gratefully seizes on a leaving gift from a boy of a translation of Aeschylus by Robert Browning (hence the title). That is, until his wife maliciously turns the knife by questioning the boy’s motives. This is a bleak and melancholy piece in which the only relief comes perhaps from a bracing confrontation of the truth.

Rattigan plays with his usual themes of restraint and repression, the power of convention and of the unspoken. Though his theatrical star declined from the mid-Fifties, Rattigan is enjoying a 21st century revival as the full house in Oxford demonstrated. These two well-furnished productions under the banner heading of Summer 1954 and the direction of James Dacre are further proof that this important playwright has found his deserved place once again.

The play runs at the Oxford Playhouse to Saturday, February 15.

Philip Gooden