Review by Simon Jenner, June 3rd 2025
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.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz.
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.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz.
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.
Associate Designer Rachel Wingate, Associate Sound Designer Marie Zschommler, Casting Director Matthew Dewsbury CDG, CSM Jade Gooch, DSM Chloe Forestier-Walker, ASM Maddie Lawless, Production & Technical Andy Owen Cook, Production Technician Priya Virdee, Production Lighting Technician Chris Galler
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz.
