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Many modern parents consider it tantamount to child abuse. But the boarding school, from 'Tom Jones' to 'Harry Potter', is a poignant and significant edifice in the British imagination. It is portrayed frankly, with a certain tenderness and masculine sentimentality in this finely acted double bill.
Dignified by oak panelling and haunted by the unbroken voices of boys, these boarding school plays by Terence Rattigan (formerly of Harrow) and David Hare (formerly of Lancing College) have graduated, like so many other current West End productions, from Chichester Theatre's superb class of 2011.
Hare, who came of age in the late '60s and has been rocking the establishment ever since, is a very different writer from Terence Rattigan, whose elegant, emotive 1940s dramas were enjoyed by a popular audience recovering from the European war. But 'South Downs', Hare's witty and tender portrait of a misfit '60s schoolboy, is a fine tribute to Rattigan's one-act masterpiece about a failed classics master on the brink of unpensioned retirement. And both plays are windows into this deep-rooted system of education, designed for progress towards orthodox goals and enforced by a mixture of cruelty and kindness.
In Hare's 'South Downs', sensitively directed by Jeremy Herrin, the agony - and ecstasy - of being a teenager takes centre stage. Fourteen-year old scholarship boy John Blakemore, played with tact and skill by young actor Alex Lawther, is lonely and precocious. He reads Camus on his day off, writes to the Daily Express to protest when the authorities won't let him wear his CND badge, and feels wretched because his mother lives 'in a semi-detached'.
Hare's play is essentially kindly and young Blakemore is rescued from bomb-hating despond by the concerted effort of several decent vividly drawn chaps who penetrate beyond their potentially tweedy types. Particularly enjoyable are the benevolent school reverend 'Eric the Hysteric' (Nicholas Farrell) and charismatic prefect Jeremy Duffield (Jonathan Bailey), who wears waistcoats to school and is rumoured to have had sexual relations (oh, pinnacle of '60s glamour!) with an air hostess.
Despite the irony that everyone in Hare's play believes Harold Wilson will change everything, you leave it confident that young Blakemore's cleverness will not condemn him to the arid fate of Rattigan's Andrew Crocker-Harris, known to his students as 'The Crock' and his colleagues as 'the Himmler of the Lower Fifth.' 'The Browning Version' is a sadder, darker, more powerful play than its witty young companion, largely because its main protagonists are men, not boys.
The splendid Anna Chancellor, last seen quenching young Blakemore's griefs with tea and cake from Fortnum's, returns in gorgon-like guise as The Crock's bitter wife Millie. As Crocker-Harris, Nicholas Farrell changes Eric the Hysteric's clerical collar for something more restrictive but no less beautifully expressed by this actor: years of academic failure and a loveless marriage. Mark Umbers gives strong, suave support as Frank Hunter, Millie's reluctant lover. Together, the plays offer a moving portrait of boys and men, their loneliness and camaraderie in the institutions which have formed them.