Accolade

When a public figure falls from grace, who is the most immoral? He for breaking the rules? Or the press and public for ensuring that his transgression wrecks not just his own life, but those of everyone around him?

The Leveson Enquiry examined the technicalities surrounding this question at length, but Emlyn Williams’s 1950 play gently points to the more human side of the problem. At its heart is a writer protagonist whose promiscuity is accepted by his own family, but who finds himself in the media dock once he accepts a knighthood.

Blanche McIntyre’s warm, engaging production – a grander  restaging of her acclaimed 2011 revival at the tiny Finborough Theatre – takes us into territory extensively mapped out by both Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. The dialogue is witty, the men and women pretty, and the drinks cabinet and closet both enjoy starring roles.

In a room lined with books and tradition, Alexander Hanson’s benignly anarchic author Will Trenting has just revealed to his wife that he has been made a knight. Abigail Cruttenden’s Rona Trenting is a woman of extraordinary emotional generosity who both knows of and accepts her husband’s enjoyment of orgies. Yet even she cannot foresee how his elevation to respectability will threaten to tear the family apart.

Williams was bisexual and the play is closely modelled on his own life. But since this is the ’50s, Trenting’s penchant is depicted as being for working-class girls rather than boys. For the first two-thirds of the play, his emotional honesty and his ability to turn his lifestyle into great literature dominate the action. Yet the arrival of Bruce Alexander’s creepy Daker reveals an unexpected consequence to Trenting’s secret life that will, once revealed, impact on the life of Trenting’s precocious and sensitive teenage son, Ian.
 
Without wishing to spoil the twist, Daker’s revelation evokes the spectre of some of today’s sex scandals. There is no doubt here that Trenting has been set up, and it is typical of his lack of hypocrisy that he questions his entire lifestyle as an indirect cause of his downfall rather than blaming the idiocy and malice of those around him. Yet despite the undoubted relevance of the questions the play raises, it feels like a period piece rather than modern commentary. The production’s appeal has as much to do with the beautifully measured performances as with the issues raised – not least Sam Clemmett’s Ian, whose heartbreaking trust in his father leads to the most powerful moment of the entire evening.