Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play.
Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Even amazing productions of his plays have basically been set in some variant of a period drawing room. But with Lau’s Man and Boy, Rattigan finally joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall.
Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set is a billiard table-like spread of green with a smattering of period decor (a wireless, a dial phone). The centre is dominated by a series of metal legged, Formica-looking tables of the sort that I don’t think existed in 1934, the year in which the play is set. And the very long dot-matrix printed financial report deployed at one point is definitely not right. Oh, and on the back wall in an alluring retro font is an actual cast list that illuminates the names and roles of whoever is on stage at the time (aesthetics aside, this is just a bloody good idea.).
I don’t think every part of the design is loaded with meaning. But collectively it sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy score gives the whole thing a sense of danger, unpredictability and transcendence of a specific time and place.
It also liberates star Ben Daniels from period constraints, freeing him up to deliver what is easily the best stage performance of the year to date. He plays Gregor Antonescu, a Machiavellian Romanian-born financier who is up to his eyeballs in the American economy, and seems likely to be on the cusp of triggering a fresh financial crash due to discrepancies in his accounts threatening to derail a gargantuan merger.
I’ve not seen the play before (it’s not been staged here since 2005), but you can see that despite some shockingly dark moments, Antonescu could be played as just another stereotypical Rattigan protagonist: a posh, witty middle-aged guy with a plan. He spends much of the first half quipping his way through an elaborate scheme to restart his ailing empire as he turns up on the Greenwich Village doorstep of his estranged son Basil (Laurie Kynaston) as he looks for a spot to lie low and regroup.
But Daniels goes in for none of that. With a soft but impeccable south-east European accent and distinctly un-banker-like undercut, he launches into his part with the psychotic bonhomie of an affable film Nazi who you just know is going to flip out and murder somebody in cold blood at some point. Okay, this is a Rattigan play: he doesn’t murder anyone. But he’s seethingly dangerous, his shark-like charm punctuated by flashes of bottomless rage and an unsettling, insectoid physicality as he prowls and scuttles over the tables.
He is frightening and unpredictable, a sort of nightmare amalgam of JP Morgan and Joseph Goebbels). And yes, as unconstrained global elites - from tech bros to Presidents - continue to batter and manipulate our lives with their delusions of godlike grandeur, Daniels’ represents all of them and none of them. He’s not a ‘30s financier, but an otherworldly, inhuman thing, not motivated by greed but rather a desire to manipulate and control. An avatar of the worst human instincts.
Despite the first half finishing on a note of howling, feral triumph, we are aware that what goes up is likely to come down. But Antonescu’s ending is as remarkable as his victory - a man who takes every last gamble he can before abruptly calling it quits without a shred of bitterness.
There are other actors in Man and Boy too! Notably Kynaston as Antonescu’s boozy but sweet-natured son Basil, who has spent five years hiding from his father but can’t help but go wide-eyed over him, even when he sucks him into a truly horrible scheme. And you get it: Daniels’ Antonescu is utterly awful but nonetheless remarkable.
It’s a good performance from Kynaston, but like the rest of the supporting cast he very wisely offers a fairly trad turn and just generally gets out of the way of Daniels when required.
First staged in 1963 – when Rattigan had famously fallen out of fashion – it’s a little OTT compared to The Deep Blue Sea et al. It’s probably a failing that Basil ultimately just feels like a stunned bystander to his dad’s antics (though I’m sure this is what it’s like being one of the innumerable spawn of Elon Musk et al). But whether or not the source material is flawed, this is an extraordinary couple of hours of theatre, the performance of the year wrapped up in a wild production that tears up everything we thought we knew about how to stage good old Terence Rattigan.
