FringeReview UK 2026
Man and Boy
National Theatre, London
Genre: Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: National Theatre, Dorfman
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The theatrics of capitalism, its male toxicity and plunge, its inhumane titans eating their own children has enjoyed theatrical and TV acclaim, from Enron and The Lehman Trilogy to Succession. This unfairly troubled play receives a near-definitive revival at the National Theatre’s Dorfman directed by Anthony Lau till March 14.
An almost flawless revival of a work that might yet prove a masterpiece.
Review
The theatrics of capitalism, its male toxicity and plunge, its inhumane titans eating their own children has enjoyed theatrical and TV acclaim, from Enron and The Lehman Trilogy to Succession. It sounds so familiar it’s a surprise Terence Rattigan’s 1963 Man and Boy, triumphantly revived at the Duchess in 2005, wasn’t staged after the crash on his 2011 centenary. This unfairly troubled play does though receive a near-definitive revival at the National Theatre’s Dorfman directed by Anthony Lau till March 14.
About time, since Rattigan was well ahead of most: that is, depicting the hollowness of an entire system yet portraying seismic personal fallout. In this case a father needing a son to hate him lest love penetrate his armour; and failing. Despite at one point using him as sexual bait. It’s Rattigan’s darkest, most unsettled and unsettling play, unlike anything else he wrote.
Man and Boy is presented not in the realism Rattigan habitually invites; but in Georgia Lowe’s set and costumes, lit by Elliot Griggs, as a quasi-expressionist piece, part O’Neill, part Upton Sinclair’s Babbitt. A single bedroom evokes the Stock Exchange with actors’ names lit on one board (so obscured to many) when present; and a green square with bare office tables and chairs only, serving as bed or platform. It’s as stark and wired as a nocturnal office out of Mad Men.
Gregor Antonescu (Ben Daniels) strides those tables with coiled energy that can snap to a ferocious put-down, and quiet menace, as when he wants to get rid of someone. While incongruously Daniels seems to exude something of the charisma of a very different phenomenon: Greece’s ex-finance minister and Marxist intellectual Yanis Varoufakis. In an early draft we’re told, Antonescu does actually cite Maynard Keynes! In any case Daniels gives what’s likely to be the standout performance of the year.
Much talking is done not at table but standing on one. It further pushes back the myth of Rattigan as a comfy three-act playwright; and provokes responses Rattigan himself hoped for, as he drew on the same post-1956 theatrical conventions that so damaged his own reputation. Indeed the three acts are ruptured, returning to an original two-act format. Though the text is definitive, a few cuts are made; with an interval where the 2005 version also paused. If Rattigan was pushing for acceptance as a 1960s playwright, this retro-modernism might have pleased him. It still lasts two-and-a-half hours, yet flies by.
Greenwich Village, summer 1934. It’s Carol Penn (Phoebe Campbell) and Oxford-educated Englishman Basil Anthony (Laurie Kynaston) who first stir in this play. Post-coital lovers probing and refusing to be probed. Actor Carol wants bar pianist Basil to be more open. After much equivocation from him she gets her wish when famous financier, just now announced on the radio as in freefall, blows in. Turns out he’s Basil or Vassily’s father, whom Basil shot at then blanked for the last five years. But Basil’s barely even disguised his own name. Even if he shot at his father, his need for love and approval is undiminished. Kynaston’s initial bluster gives way to concern and the carapace cracks: not loudly but actively.
Campbell and Daniels circle each other with wary charm. In truth Antonescu sides with her on her desire to marry Basil/Vassily, explains the difference between “liquidity and confidence” which is illusory, but wants her out of the way. No need: she’s an understudy and we don’t see Campbell’s sassy but loving character again. If there’s a fault here it’s that the two women in the seven-strong cast interact with virtually no-one but father and son; and themselves never meet. Despite restoring Rattigan’s text (productions had cut them down further) they’re to a degree marginalised.
By this time Antonescu’s loyal second Seven Johnson (an anxiously able Nick Fletcher, biting back doubts) has arrived, but even he knows less than he should. Though he knows “Stalin is a man I can do business with” and Mussolini depends on Antonescu; as indeed do impoverished nations, as his window-dressing (something Basil swallows whole). The full panoply of Daniels’ performative wizardry is reserved for his antagonists. Industrialist Mark Herries (a silken yet vulnerable Malcolm Sinclair) who’s pulling out of a crucial merger with Antonescu; and the accountant who’s caused all the trouble by finding the fantasy in Antonescu’s figures: but in Rumanian. David Beeston (a superbly nerdish, excitably outraged performance by Leo Wan) provokes the pyrotechnics of a man who declares “In finance, man makes his own mistakes.” Though Antonescu is always “The Man” it’s what kind of man he now presents to Herries that furnishes the centrepiece: pimping his own son, in a subtle entrapment of Herries.
In 1961 this was extraordinary enough to lead to Rex Harrison pulling out early on, and homophobic jibes in reviews two years later. As in other plays, Rattigan pushed further sexual – and psychological – boundaries than most of his immediate successors would dare. It surely partly led to his (now friend) John Osborne’s A Patriot For Me of 1965.
Before the climactic confrontation between the Man and the boy, Countess Antonescu (Isabella Laughland) arrives: Florence, a young typist from London whom Antonescu marries as she puts it for “sex and signatures”. Laughland’s portrayal of Florence’s venality, at its worst when she can’t stomach Antonescu’s minor stroke and refuses to be with him at the end, is flickered through with warmth. “I could love you, you know, if you’d let me” isn’t here entirely self-serving. Her reaction to Antonescu’s final plan is partly chilling, partly a filament of decency snuffed by his chill.
Nevertheless it’s the interactions with the increasingly alienated yet decent Fletcher, and Kynaston’s Basil that crack open Daniels’ character. Determined almost to the last on disabusing his son of illusions about them both, the reckoning is merciless. Antonescu even deconstructs Basil’s socialism as personal reaction yet imparts advice. Yet realises his “those who act and those who don’t. The strong and the weak, I suppose” as he confides to Sven isn’t so true. Too late he realises his son’s inner strength. Like Brecht redrafting Mother Courage, to make his central character more inhumane, Rattigan luckily fails to dehumanise his. Antonescu is irredeemable, but he is human. Kynaston and Daniels prove it.
Lau’s pacy production is strong on expressionism, and his staging is refreshing. Is it expressive, however differently, of Rattigan’s vision of vulnerability and love traduced? Judging by the 2005 production, there’s still textual choices to be made, a slight instability not inappropriate to Man and Boy. An almost flawless revival of a work that might yet prove a masterpiece.
Movement and choreography by Aline David Angus MacRae’s music (sound by Giles Thomas)
Intimacy Director Haruka Kuroda, Casting Director Martin Pile CDG, Dialect Coach Aundrea Fudge, Voice Coach Cathleen McCarron, Associate Set and Costume Designer Joy Chen, Staff Director Rachel Lemon.
