“Summer 1954” at Theatre Royal Bath
Simon Thomas in South West England
1 November 2024
In a first coupling, Theatre Royal Bath and Living Theatre Productions are staging two one-act Rattigan plays – Table Number Seven from Separate Tables and The Browning Version – under the umbrella title of Summer 1954. The plays work well together, both telling the story of weak men finding the strength to go on facing the world, much as Hester Collyer does in The Deep Blue Sea. In a good year for Rattigan revivals, Bath’s excellent studio production of the latter is now headed for the West End.
Sian Phillips and Alexandra Dowling in Table Number Seven.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The short plays in Summer 1954 are exquisitely crafted object lessons in conciseness, full of subtlety and compassion, packing a world of drama into an hour each side of the interval.
The production uses Rattigan’s revised version of Table Number Seven, which he wrote for the 1956 Broadway production, though it was not used and it was over 40 years before it was finally presented, at the King’s Head in London in 1998. Here the “crime” committed by the phoney Major Pollock is importuning men on the esplanade rather than sexually harassing women in cinemas. This delivers a much greater dramatic punch. The supposedly lesser offence is hardly likely to gain a modern audience’s sympathy now that sexual pestering of women is taken much more seriously.
The playwright had an ambiguous relationship with his mother Vera, who died in 1971, just six years before his own death, and to whom he could never reveal his homosexuality. He portrays her in the Separate Tables playlet as the fiercely bigoted old gossip Mrs Railton-Bell, but not without strains of humour. She relishes the scandal that the major brings to their little boarding house community and the power she feels she can yield in getting him banished for his disgusting crimes. At the same time, she crushes the spirit of her repressed daughter Sybil beneath a facade of solicitous care.
A 91-year-old Siân Phillips is still a formidable presence on stage and imbues the matriarch with a fussy salaciousness in her enjoyment of the incident that breaks up the boredom of an eventless old age. The crestfallen look on her face, as everyone around her reaches out to the disgraced Pollock, stripped of all pretence and dignity, will remain in the memory for a long time.
Nathaniel Parker gives the miscreant a painful joviality, bringing out all the suffering of a man enveloped in deep self-loathing and recrimination. The play is a deeply moving call for acceptance amidst prejudice that drops away as those around him find a core of decency that Rattigan must have believed and hoped the British public had. It is reminiscent of John Gielgud, who in 1953 was charged with soliciting in public toilets. Fearing that his career was over he found the courage to face a full audience on his return to the stage, to be greeted by a standing ovation.
Nathaniel Parker and Lolita Chakrabarti in The Browning Version.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
After the break, Parker portrays another man at the end of his tether, the downtrodden public-school classics teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris, “The Crock” to the boys. It’s a portrait in abject failure and repressed emotion but, again, the protagonist finally finds the strength to fight back in his own small way.
Lolita Chakrabarti is his flighty, bitchy wife Millie, carrying on an affair under his nose and rubbing it in at every opportunity. She is living with a world of pain herself but there’s not much opportunity to sympathize with her.
Parker is heartbreaking as he crumbles at the suggestion that one of his charges actually likes him, expressed in the small gift of a second-hand book, the Robert Browning version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
There is a large and strong supporting cast across the two pieces, with Simon Coates particularly noticeable as a hesitant Mr Fowler in the first and the wretched headmaster Dr Frobisher in the second. Alexandra Dowling also stands out as the timid Sybil Railton-Bell in Table Number Seven and Jeremy Neumark Jones does a notable double as liberal young husband Charles Stratton and redeemed adulterer Frank Hunter. There are fine performances in smaller roles from Richenda Carey (Miss Meacham) and Pamela Miles (Lady Matheson), both in the first play.
Mike Britton’s revolving set spins between locations for both plays, providing a fine backdrop to the drama. The finely honed direction is by James Dacre, founder of Living Theatre Productions.
After a short Bath run, the production tours to Malvern, Cambridge, Chichester, Richmond, Cheltenham, and Oxford. It’s worth catching both for Rattigan’s perennially relevant craft and what could be Siân Phillips’s final stage appearances.
