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Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Rattigan's films are as important as his plays
A campaign is under way to rename the West End's Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there's evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It's an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger. It was as if Osborne were saying, 'Look, Ma, I'm not Terence Rattigan!' he quipped. However, the Rattigan-bashing was always an empty indulgence. Osborne himself admitted as much on these very pages in 1993, writing: 'I have been intrigued by the success of the current revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan was under the general frown when I first joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and both George Devine and Tony Richardson were appalled when I confessed to being moved by the play.' Perhaps a Rattigan Theatre would indeed lay some of the ghosts to rest. But on first hearing news of the campaign, another thought occurred: Rattigan deserves a cinema as well. Film was arguably much kinder to him than theatre ever was in the low ebbs of his career. It supplied him with constant work, saw some of his best adaptations, and allowed his writing to weather the storm. Without his breakout play French Without Tears (1936), British cinema wouldn't have acquired one of its classic rogues, Rex Harrison, whose name it thrust into the spotlight. But French Without Tears was chiefly important because its adaptation in 1940 was Rattigan's first collaboration with director Anthony Asquith – and the first success of his screen career. Few could match Asquith's ability to adapt stage classics for film. The son of liberal prime minister Herbert, Asquith junior had directed an Oscar-nominated Pygmalion (1938), with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, as well as the most celebrated version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), with Edith Evans as the definitive Lady Bracknell. Like so many British artists, Rattigan and Asquith were drafted into propaganda duties during the war. And it resulted in their first truly great work, The Way to the Stars (1945). The film had a Who's Who cast – Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Trevor Howard, all of whom would return to work with Asquith and Rattigan – and in its quieter moments, observing the grin-and-bear-it times of a British bomber base, hinted at their true creative potential. Postwar, Asquith returned to Rattigan's stage work with an adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1948. It perfectly captured the it's-just-not-cricket mentality of the original play with its story of a boy unjustly expelled from naval college. Rattigan would take up these themes again (to lesser effect) in The Final Test (1953), but The Winslow Boy had the advantage of Robert Donat in the lead role at the height of his powers. Asquith's take on The Browning Version was another great example of his refusal to follow the growing spectacle – albeit much of it magnificent – of contemporaries such as David Lean and Michael Powell. Refraining from visual tricks or even much of a musical score, Asquith allows Rattigan's poise and melancholy to speak for itself. It may be one of the most quietly devastating English films ever made. And as the retiring classics teacher who may or may not be missed by his pupils, Michael Redgrave gives one of his most heart-wrenching performances as Crocker-Harris. Rattigan was not tied to Asquith, and pursued multiple projects outside of his preoccupation with upper-middle-class England. He created the original screenplay for Brighton Rock (1948), for example, Graham Greene's story of wide-boy knife gangs directed by John Boulting. It was reworked before reaching the screen but Greene crucially retained Rattigan's vision of the work as a thriller rather than an intellectual treatise. The Boultings kept Rattigan's change of ending, too, in which a gramophone recording of Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) jams on 'I love you…' before he lays into his love interest. Rattigan didn't generally shy away from the brutality of romantic relationships. The Deep Blue Sea (1955) is testament to that. Influenced by the relationship between Rattigan and actor Kenneth Morgan, the play's curtain-twitching portrait of a squalid postwar London is still one of his most unflinching of love stories. Vivien Leigh was cast as Hester, the spurned lover of RAF pilot Freddie, played by Kenneth More, who had transferred from the original play. More suggested that Leigh brought too much glamour to the part. Yet with Leigh's mental health deteriorating and her personal life crumbling, she appears in hindsight to have been all too right for The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan then teamed up with Leigh's husband Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), but Rattigan's last great screen work was his collaboration a year later with Delbert Mann on the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables. Another of his tragic ensemble pieces, the film saw a wealth of stars gathered in a run-down Bournemouth hotel, all forced to examine their lives after the revelation of a scandal involving the retired Major Pollock played by David Niven. Niven has the film to thank for the only Oscar win of his career, and Rattigan for his second nomination. (He received his first in 1952 for scripting David Lean's The Sound Barrier.) What happened next might have been the apex of Rattigan's screen career yet turned out to be the beginning of the end. In 1960 he had started working with the Rank Organisation to adapt his T.E. Lawrence play Ross. It was to star Dirk Bogarde and Asquith was slated to direct. But there was a problem: another Lawrence film was already in the works. Out of respect to David Lean – and under some pressure from Lawrence of Arabia producer Sam Spiegel – the studio pulled the plug on the project. Bogarde called it his 'bitterest disappointment'. Rattigan and Asquith ploughed on, assembling star-studded casts for two further movies, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), with all favours from friends called in. But even with Rattigan's work finding new audiences on television, the 1960s were relentlessly unforgiving. His last screenplay of note was the wonderful musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), with Peter O'Toole, before he fled into creative (and tax) exile to Bermuda. A knighthood in 1971 and a minor reconciliation with the theatre industry before his death in 1977 did little to remedy his unhappiness. The West End rediscovers Rattigan's work almost every decade. But the screen never forgot him. Terence Davies's hypnotic version of The Deep Blue Sea (2011) with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston converted a whole new generation. Rattigan no doubt deserves a theatre. His contribution continues to enrich the British stage – especially in its deeply English themes, its styling and restraint. But his dedication to the screen suggests a Rattigan cinema wouldn't go amiss either.
New Statesman
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Kemi Badenoch sinks further into the mire
Illustration by André Carrilho 'Here for the funeral?' asked the man in the seat next to me. Short, stout, bearded, behatted, pot-bellied: he looked just like a garden gnome. We were in the Duchess Theatre, Covent Garden, home of the pre-theatre set menu, luvvie-land. What the gnome called 'the funeral' – and what we might call the 'oooooffft, not again' or the 'should she really have that job?' or the 'why does she keep doing this to herself?' – belonged to Kemi Badenoch, for now the leader of His Majesty's opposition. The gnome, a retired civil servant, had come in search of Schadenfreude. He was here all the way from Eastbourne, gleeful and triumphant, to watch Badenoch on stage in conversation with the comedian Matt Forde. The live talk would be recorded for Forde's popular podcast The Political Party. 'It's a slow-motion car crash,' said Gnome, widely smiling, before Badenoch had even appeared. Car crash, funeral, whatever. If you want to understand British politics, know that there are men out there who not only look like a Renaissance woodcut of a mythical mountain-dwelling creature but who will travel one hour and 35 minutes on Southern Rail to watch a politician they hate exchange sensible on stage banter out of pure spite. In Britain, complicated forms of bitterness and political despair play out through evening attendance as light entertainment. I suppose it's better than the way these things resolve themselves in Myanmar. The tickets for Forde-Badenoch cost £26.50: a price Gnome was happy to pay. A flannel-and-cardigan audience settled into their seats around us. What was Badenoch doing with Forde? It was a deep mystery, much like the continued existence of Emmerdale. Was she doing outreach a few doors down from the Royal Ballet? Are there many votes left for Conservative leaders in the bullseye centre of liberal London, or did one of her aides book her in for the sweet comic grilling months ago, when the Tories weren't finishing fourth in Scottish by-elections on an apocalyptic 6 per cent of the vote? The move showed ambition, which Badenoch can never be accused of lacking. For every two voters the Conservatives are at risk of losing to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, one exhausted Tory flack told me this week, they haemorrhage five or six to Reform. Badenoch could turn the tide against Nigel Farage right here in the Duchess by talking about herself for 45 minutes in front of an audience of Lib Dems. Before anything happened, Gnome began a rambling and dirty joke about Nicholas Soames, who I am required by law to tell you is Winston Churchill's grandson. I think Gnome may just have hated Conservative politicians. He said the joke was Forde's, although I have in the past heard it attributed to Sarah Sands, the former editor of the Today programme. Forde appeared in a shiny blue suit buttoned at the waist, set off by box-fresh white Air Jordans. He was amusing, although his gags appeared to have been printed out on A4 paper and stuck to a box at the front of the stage. Alan Lockey, the Prime Minister's speechwriter, took an indirect pasting. 'Keir Starmer has a weird way with words,' Forde began, before entering a passably nasal Starmer impression: 'I know what it's like to work in a factory… because my dad did it.' Not quite the same thing, is it, as Forde quickly pointed out – you can try this yourself. Pick your most benighted dead relative. 'I know what it's like to get blown up at the Somme… because my great-grandfather did it.' Convincing? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I was growing impatient for Badenoch. Understatement induces me to say that her leadership has not gone very well so far. Consider a recent defence of Ukraine that she made on one of the Sunday shows: within hours it was clipped, trussed up, lipsticked and used by the Russian embassy for their own propaganda purposes. As a parable, it's pure Badenoch. She wants to do one thing. The opposite happens. The disintegration has since accelerated. A few days previously Badenoch had given a big speech on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Imagine you are a right-wing politician fighting off an even more right-wing insurgency that draws all of its energy from promising mass asylum deportations, strong borders, the full Children of Men barbed-wire-and-police-dogs scenario. Would you then promise to leave the ECHR, which effectively stops the government from doing any of that? You might think Badenoch would have made this promise by now. But in that speech Badenoch effectively said she was going to send a consumer complaint email to the court in Strasbourg with her intention to announce a recommendation she had been advised to consider by someone else about the possibility of maybe, after taking some time to come up with a plan, perhaps or perhaps not leaving the ECHR. Strong stuff. Cask-strength. The speech may keep One Nation Tories happy in the parliamentary Conservative Party while opening a vast steppe for Nigel Farage to graze on. After the speech, Badenoch told the BBC she was going to improve: 'You don't want people to be the very best they're going to be on day one. You want people who are going to get better.' Picture Tony Blair saying that. Or Margaret Thatcher. To the extent that anything can get better when you are facing the possibility of being leapfrogged in the polls by the Green Party, Badenoch did improve once she settled, in a gold sleeveless blouse and long black skirt, into a low chair opposite Forde. For one thing, Gnome immediately fell asleep once she began talking. His head drooped first, then his chin settled on his belly. He breathed gently through his round, red nose. Badenoch has been known to induce a similar effect when she posts short-form video content on X, or speaks at Prime Minister's Questions. What's it like being leader of the opposition, Forde asked. Fascinating, Badenoch said, in a posh, slightly hoarse voice. She compared leading the Tories to Game of Thrones, a show in which most characters she might be compared to are murdered by nasty and treacherous methods. She said she'd received advice from past Tory leaders but not Liz Truss, whom she claimed might have lost Badenoch's phone number. 'But she's so good with numbers,' quipped Forde. To laughter, Badenoch poked Forde: 'Do an impression of me.' He mouthed the air before refusing. We were here to see the nice man who wrote Politically Homeless, not Jim Davidson. Badenoch condemned nationalisation, a Fabian idea Nigel Farage has taken a spooky interest in recently. 'Who would want a politician running a business?' Badenoch asked the now-silent audience, raising the uncomfortable question: who would want this Conservative Party running anything? They're not a party right now. They're a bag of snakes. Badenoch was right about Game of Thrones. Some of the material being shopped around to undermine her in Westminster is truly Targaryen in its uncompromising brutality. Leaks that make you shudder at the possibilities of human betrayal, even when the stakes are low: taking over the leadership of Britain's third most- popular political party. 'I've chosen a very, very difficult path,' said Kemi Badenoch as the funeral ended. Gnome slept on soundly. Forde grinned. She wasn't being funny. [See also: Laughing at the populist right is not a political strategy] Related
Glasgow Times
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
The Last Laugh play about comedy legends coming to Glasgow
The Last Laugh, written and directed by Paul Hendy, will be performed at the Theatre Royal from July 15 to 19. This follows a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The play re-imagines the lives of comedy legends Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe, and Bob Monkhouse. It is filled with jokes and stories, and is said to be "nostalgic" and "poignant". The lead actors will be reprising their roles from the Edinburgh run. Bob Golding will play Eric Morecambe, a role he previously played in the West End hit Morecambe at the Duchess Theatre. He was nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance. Damian Williams will take on the role of Tommy Cooper, having previously played the comedian in the tour of Being Tommy Cooper. Simon Cartwright has been an actor and impressionist since the 1980s and has appeared on the award-winning Channel 4 show Toast of London. Jamie Wilson, the producer, said: "The team here at JWP were bowled over by the relevance of their timeless comedy and after seeing it myself in Edinburgh, I just knew it had to have a further life so many more people could experience it. "What is so brilliant about this play is the audiences who love and remember Eric, Tommy and Bob will be able to relive their comedy greatness and those that don't, will be introduced to the genius of these national treasures. "I'm so pleased these icons will be back on the London stage for audiences to enjoy." The Last Laugh's set design is by Lee Newby, music and soundscape design by Ethan Lewis Maltby, sound design by Callum Wills, costume design by Amy Chamberlain and casting by Kate Roddy.
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
5 best comedy theatre shows in London 2025
You're spoiled for choice when it comes to the best comedy shows in London, thanks to the wide range of fantastic productions – from long-running favourites to topical new entries. Whether you're on the hunt for side-splitting slapstick, razor-sharp satire or family fun, there's something to suit all tastes in the West End. You can find all the latest London comedy plays in our round-up of the best London shows, plus productions that are particularly good for young audiences in our best family shows piece, as well as top picks below that include reviews by the Telegraph's expert critics. These brilliant rib-ticklers are guaranteed to give you a big laugh, and a great night out. So, follow our guide and get booking now for the best London comedy plays and musicals in 2025. Mrs Doubtfire, Shaftesbury Theatre In a nutshell: Fans of the classic film comedy starring Robin Williams can't miss this hysterical, but also kind-hearted, musical adaptation, which turns everyone's favourite Scottish nanny into a West End sensation. When Daniel, a well-meaning but perennially out-of-work actor, loses his children in a divorce, he becomes Mrs Doubtfire – but keeping the secret is his toughest job yet. This lovely child-friendly production adds creative musical numbers to a witty script, including all the best movie scenes, while also reassuring kids that all families look different. 'Fear not, dearies – this exuberant show is still one of the biggest treats in the West End... Gabriel Vick is on fire in his utterly astonishing tour-de-force performance.' Read the full review of Mrs Doubtfire Booking until: April 26 2025 The Play That Goes Wrong, Duchess Theatre In a nutshell: If you want to end up crying with laughter, you need to make a bee-line for Mischief's world-conquering smash-hit comedy. The show is celebrating its 10th glorious year in the West End, and it's not hard to see why: this irresistible farce is precision-tooled entertainment. Join the hapless members of an unfortunate amateur dramatics society who are trying to stage a country-house murder mystery – even as everything goes hilariously wrong, from forgotten dialogue and missed cues to prop mishaps, crazy accidents, and the whole set collapsing around them. 'Seldom has disaster delivered so many belly laughs... This spoof am-dram staging of an Agatha Christie whodunit is the perfect recipe for absurd slapstick.' Booking until: February 1 2026 Book tickets via Telegraph tickets Fawlty Towers – The Play, Apollo Theatre In a nutshell: Just when you thought it was safe to book into the hotel, Basil Fawlty and gang are back! Yes, John Cleese has adapted one of the best sitcoms of all time (which he co-created with Connie Booth) into a deliriously funny new stage comedy. It serves up three brilliant TV episodes – Hotel Inspectors, Communication Problems, and The Germans – as one amazing show, and all your favourite characters are checking in too: of course, there's Basil's wife Sybil, waiter Manuel, chambermaid Polly, and guests like the Major. Don't mention the war... 'An indisputably funny evening of mistaken identity, furtive horse-betting and flagrant Teuton-baiting... Wall-to-wall nostalgia and copper-bottomed mirth.' Booking resumes: June 24 until September 13 2025 The Book of Mormon, Prince of Wales Theatre In a nutshell: You couldn't write it now! This totally outrageous, and totally hysterical, musical satire is from the genius minds of South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone, teaming up with Oscar-winning composer Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, Frozen) to make fun of the Mormon church, and plenty else besides. It's equal-opportunities fun, with a cartoon energy, lightning-fast jokes, unbelievable songs, and a sweet core celebrating unlikely friendship as two mismatched missionaries try to convert a village in Uganda. Take this leap of faith – you won't regret it. 'This wild, thrilling, go-for-broke, genuinely hilarious musical comedy remains one of the funniest shows in the West End... I'm a believer!' Read the full review of The Book of Mormon Booking until: July 12 2025 Frequently asked questions What are the newest West End shows? One of the best things about London's buzzy West End is that there is always a new show to discover – whether you're catching up with a recent hit, or want to discover the very latest phenomenon. The first thing you should do is check out our constantly updated round-up of the best London shows, which features useful information and reviews for all the latest theatre openings. We've also got a handy list of the best family shows in London.
