“In Praise of Love” at Orange Tree Theatre
Neil Dowden in south-west London
6 June 2025
Following shortly after Theatre Royal Bath’s poignant production of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea opening in the West End, his 1973 play In Praise of Love is now revived by Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. But while the former is probably Rattigan’s masterpiece written at the height of his career, the latter is a rarely produced late work premiered when his reputation had faded. Amelia Sears’s sensitive staging takes a while to get going but ultimately it too makes a good case for the play as it reaches a powerful emotional climax.
Joe Edgar and Claire Price.
Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.
Rattigan said the story was loosely inspired by the relationship between his friend Rex Harrison and fellow actor Kay Kendall with whom Harrison was having an affair but then married when he found out Kendall was terminally ill with acute myeloid leukaemia while keeping the diagnosis from her. In In Praise of Love there is a similar medical concealment motivated by love, but also entailing a repression of feeling that is Rattigan’s raison d’être as a playwright (and which may well reflect too his own personal life as a gay man when homosexuality was still illegal).
Sebastian and Lydia Cruttwell have been married for 28 years after they met in Berlin at the end of the war. The half-Jewish Estonian Lydia had taken part in the resistance as well as surviving a Nazi concentration camp, but as a British military intelligence officer Sebastian married her so that she could escape Soviet occupation. They settle into post-war family life in Britain. After cutting short a promising debut as a novelist, Sebastian becomes an eminent Marxist literary critic, while their more politically mainstream son Joey is a budding writer.
When Sebastian’s friend Mark – a bestselling American novelist who is in love with Lydia – returns to London they both confide in him separately (and thus us too). She tells Mark that she is seriously ill but has put a positive slant on it for Sebastian about whose future she is concerned. But Sebastian reveals to Mark that he actually knows that Lydia has only a few months to live though he has concealed this from her so as not to cause her distress, while he treats her with the usual self-centredly offhand manner that seems to mark their marriage.
It’s difficult to credit that the doctors would conspire in this deception towards a female patient even 50 years ago, but if one accepts that premise the play – as its title suggests –becomes a moving study in differing, complex modes of love that are often indirect. This is classic Rattigan territory. Sebastian’s statement “the English vice … our refusal to admit to our emotions” could be applied to most of Rattigan’s work. But it’s far from the cold stiff-upper-lip stereotype that sometimes misrepresents him. It’s the tension between real emotion and how it is expressed that drives his plays including In Praise of Love.
Lydia is more open in her affections for her husband and son, though she is also not transparent with Sebastian, while he only belatedly realizes his deep love for her after finding out he is going to lose her but disguises his grief for the sake of her peace of mind. It’s also implied that their wartime activities have encouraged them to keep secrets. The caring Mark unselfishly acts as an emotional soundboard for both of them. Joey has an awkward relationship with his overbearing father, who is angered by his active support for the Liberal Party and who misses Joey’s first play on TV, but they finally start to bond over chess in a typically indirect male way, much to Lydia’s delight.
For a playwright not known for his engagement with politics, In Praise of Love does see Rattigan touching on political-historical issues. Although Sebastian is dismissive of Lydia’s “refugee stories” he does tell Mark about the desperate measures she used to get through the war, and there is also a sense that as an outsider Lydia has never fully settled in Britain. Sebastian may attack the status quo but as a champagne socialist he is taken to task for hypocrisy by Joey.
In Praise of Love is a different work from the Orange Tree’s successful revivals of two early Rattigan hit comedies, French Without Tears and While the Sun Shines, in the last ten years. Artistic Director Tom Littler was presumably inspired to programme it by the streamed rehearsed reading of the play during Covid lockdown in 2020 at Jermyn Street Theatre when he was in charge there.
Sears’s production is admirably nuanced in this intimate, in-the-round staging. Peter Butler’s set design suggest a cultured middle-class Islington home, with its chess set, drinks table, overflowing books and bookcase facades above the stage. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting spotlights Lydia in her own world wearing a white dress with a ghostly effect. And Elizabeth Purnell’s soundscape includes soaring Estonian choral music associated with that country’s resistance movement.
Dominic Rowan does not hold back in projecting Sebastian’s demanding, chauvinistic behaviour especially in the first half though there is a sense that it is performative and that the others know this, while he is also frequently funny and later shows the intense pain lying behind his brusqueness. Claire Price gives a luminous, touching performance as the brave but vulnerable Lydia battling with conflicting emotions. Joe Edgar’s Joey – unaware of what is going on at home – is intent on making his own way in the world, while Daniel Abelson (though surely too young for the role) makes Mark a sympathetic listener and confidant who alone sees the whole picture.
