FringeReview UK 2025
In Praise of Love
Orange Tree Theatre
Genre: classical, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Orange Tree Theatre Richmond
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Orange Tree has form with Terence Rattigan and the relationship burns with a hard, gem-like flame. In Praise of Love, directed by Amelia Sears till July 5th is the third Rattigan staged in a decade. It
There’s every reason to see this rare gem, now added permanently to Rattigan’s finer plays.
Review
The Orange Tree has form with Terence Rattigan and the relationship burns with a hard, gem-like flame. In Praise of Love, directed by Amelia Sears till July 5th is the third Rattigan staged in a decade. It follows on from While the Sun Shines from 1943, a revelation that enjoyed two runs in 2019 and 2021. In Praise of Love from 1973 is an exquisite still-underrated late masterpiece, lasting two-and-a-half hours. It marks a return not just to form, but from abroad, where as his companion, director Adrian Brown remarked, Rattigan “sulked” for nearly a decade after (cruelly and wrongly) falling from fashion.
It’s also a play artistic director Tom Littler’s championed too. As director of Jermyn Street, he facilitated a lockdown zoom revival, directed by Cat Robey, featuring Issy Van Randwyck and Jack Klaff.
The art of concealment threads though Rattigan and here reaches an apogee. What’s notable is how exilic Rattigan so grasped 1970s Britain, replete with a Marxist theatre critic and mere liberal “collaborator” son.
Lydia Crutwell (Claire Price) is dying. Husband Sebastian (Dominic Rowan) knows her diagnosis but refuses to let on. Meanwhile family friend American novelist/screenwriter Mark Walters (Daniel Abelson) gets called over by Lydia for a surprising diagnosis of her own. It helps she was in the Estonian resistance; this play draws on recent history in spiralling references.
Mark’s now an impressed confederate: misunderstanding heightens. A cat’s cradle of pretences snag before each character expresses the unspoken. Rattigan, for deftly plotted reasons, builds to a great confessional.
Yet it’s extremely funny – Rattigan’s ruthless with generational, even cultural clashes. So much of the play – the underpaid nurses, the creaking infrastructure and two identical parties, seems horribly (sometimes hilariously) topical.
In Praise of Love ranges from boorish to tender through wincingly comedic and embarrassing, through smiling at grief. Each of the quartet brings a little world made cunningly. Though loosely inspired by the relationship between actors Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall (dying but didn’t know it), and uneasily echoing medical and other concealment, Rattigan’s characters are complex. They’re more evenly matched in secrets: the couple are both trained spies. It’s how Marxist Sebastian met Lydia when a young officer; and managed to get her out from behind the Iron Curtain through the legal channel of marriage. Back then it was sex and convenience. But what do they know about each other, or what each really feels? There’s an exquisite balance of tragedy and laughter.
Rowan’s gruff ex-novelist turned critic Sebastian, is a Palladian façade cracked into habit; but fragile. Rowan is compellingly under the skin of this tetchy character with feelings hidden like depth-charges: it’s a performance of stature.
Rowan only slowly terraces reveals to Abelson’s Mark. Like Lydia Mark admires Sebastian’s novels unreservedly; as does their son Joey (Joe Edgar). Who’s about to have a premiere of his own on BBC2, but canvasses for the Liberals. Father and son are contrary idealists; so not far apart.
Price’s Lydia belies her elegant hostess persona, hinting at what the past’s wrought as she opens to Mark truths about herself – and her marriage. The glaucous lens of 70s sexism isn’t flinched from here, Sears and cast bringing it out in details that make the audience both flinch and roar. How Price shades Lydia’s fear as the opposite of Sebastian’s is exquisitely painful. With a trace of Baltic accent Price retraces Lydia’s cunning; even as her body fails her. Like Rowan, she explodes with grief, but privately. Till then Sebastian (caricatured as not coping on his own) is contrasted as a stoic to Lydia’s out-staring death. But it’s not death that breaks her. It’s a revelation of love.
Edgar catches the perpetually wrong-footed young idealist of the middle-way, out-radicalised by his father. Edgar seems hurt with warmth. He unnervingly looks the part, down to rosette, hair-style, spectacles. Abelson makes a wonderfully put-upon, mildly weary interlocutor; and confessor. Mark has to endure being Sebastian’s butt in talent; and loving Lydia for 25 years. There’s sexual chemistry between all three; and a homoerotic ripple, barely acknowledged beyond a kiss.
Still, Sebastian’s “I didn’t begin really to love her until I knew I was losing her” is hard to take. Lydia’s earlier remark (also to Mark) seems a pre-emptive rebuke to the art of concealment: “Oh damn the English! Sometimes I think that their bad form doesn’t just lie in revealing their emotions, it’s in having any at all!” She’s proved wrong.
Joey’s ‘play’ produced in a black and white set, is fleetingly is one of those daft Kafkaesque parables providing the crisis. It’s horribly authentic, seen in snatches. Alarmingly the great critic’s missing and Lydia and Mark create an elaborate face-saver, even phoning another woman with claims to Sebastian; except Sebastian’s not in on it. And he has a reason too. It’s his recognition of what he’s done to Joey that shows why Rattigan needs another lightning-rod: Rowan and Edgar simmer in stand-off and recognition.
The gripping scene between Sebastian and Mark as Sebastian relates Lydia’s wartime ordeal – with its consequences and a physical fall-out – is one of Rattigan’s masterstrokes. As each scene un-skeins the implications the work resolves with a clinching in-character rapprochement.
Peter Butler’s bare set emphasises raw exposure in the round: a few chairs and table, drinks cabinet and antique TV. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting starts and ends scenes with brief incandescence; a note of transcendence. That’s echoed by Elizabeth Purnell’s often discreet music: until the thrub of what sounds like dark history blazes in Baltic-style choruses, muted but lapping lost sibyls of history.
Beyond the lost Rattigan decade between 1963’s underrated Man and Boy is the remarkable Heart to Heart a fine full-length TV play of 1962 deserves rescuing: a drama loosely based around John Freeman’s Face to Face of the period. As it is, this play’s subtleties and close-quarters confrontations prove particularly suited to an intimate production.
Abelson and Edgar are ideally cast. Rowan, given the great curmudgeon spot is terrific: emotional, skirling, confiding dismissive and blistering in self-knowledge. Price as Lydia is both tremulous and transcendent, funny, and unblinking. Her final gaze on a chess match glows with courage and asks what these characters might say the next day. Rattigan leaves them on the verge of revealing much more. There’s every reason to see this rare gem, now added permanently to the repertoire of Rattigan’s finer plays.
Costume Supervisor Eleanor Dolan, Fight Director Alex Payne, Dialect Coach Aundrea Fudge, Casting Director Helena Palmer CDG, Assistant Director Rosie Tricks. Chess Consultant Grandmaster Daniel King.
Production Manager Pam Nichol, CSM Jade Gooch, DSM Lizzi Adams, ASM Charlotte Smith-Barker, Production & Technical Director Phil Bell, Production Technician Andy Owen Cook, Production Technician Priya Virdee.
