I can’t remember when I last saw anything by Terence Rattigan. I suppose I had mentally consigned his work to the world of am-dram and school plays and thought of it as old fashioned; a bit too comfortable, like a well-worn sofa. The restoration of interest in Rattigan in recent years had largely passed me by, and I didn’t catch the latest (well-received) revival of The Deep Blue Sea at The National. Which brings me to Kenny Morgan.Kenny Morgan is not a play by Terence Rattigan, but one in which he appears as a character. It is billed by Mike Poulton, the writer, as the play Rattigan might have written after Kenny, a promising young actor who had been his lover for several years but left him over his failure to acknowledge their relationship more openly, committed suicide in 1949. Neither Terry’s public nor the Lord Chamberlain would have been quite ready to see him wash that particular piece of linen so, instead, he wrote a play about a woman who leaves her high-court judge husband, is subsequently abandoned by her new lover and then tries to gas herself. That was The Deep Blue Sea (see above), which many consider to be Rattigan’s masterpiece.
This is, of course, a terrible idea on Mike Poulton’s part. And yet…
I was fascinated, horrified, amused, gripped and moved. Poulton’s craft may not be as finely honed as Rattigan’s, maybe the pace lags occasionally in Lucy Bailey’s beautifully detailed and mostly taut production, but Paul Keating is heartbreakingly magnificent as poor, desperate Kenny, managing to be sympathetic and beguiling while soaked in self-loathing and disgust. It’s a demanding, exhausting evening for him, and as he stood for the curtain call after the trauma of his final scene, waiting alone for the rest of the cast to re-join him, the audience wanted to give him a collective, consoling hug. It’s a performance to remember.
The rest of the cast is strong too: Pierro Niel-Mee is handed a less well-drawn character in Alec, Kenny’s new lover post-Rattigan, whose selfishness and cruelty leave the actor little room for empathy, but he wears the suit of entitlement as if it were made on him. George Irving is somewhat mannered as the struck-off doctor who nearly saves Kenny, but that feels oddly appropriate in this mélange of truth, fiction and pastiche, and the unspoken burden he carries around with him informs his every inflection and gesture. Mariene Sidaway somehow manages to introduce us to the character of the post-war boarding-house landlady, all overalls and aphorisms, as if this were 1949 and we had never seen her before. Lowenna Melrose builds a character and a back-story out of a single brief appearance as Alec’s female fling and as Dafydd, Kenny’s neighbor who works in the admiralty, Matthew Bulgo brings the humdrum on stage with him and makes it thrilling. Simon Dutton as Terry, the man himself, potentially has a complicated set of realities to deal with as almost the authorial voice in a piece his character didn’t quite write, but he gives an honest and compassionate portrayal of a man living with his own hypocrisy.
Designer Robert Innes Hopkins works impeccably with the Arcola’s space to educe a seedy flat from stained woodwork and dodgy plumbing and Neil McKeown’s sound design adds some satisfying, occasionally filmic, contextual detail.
Kenny Morgan is high quality pastiche. Whether it sheds any light on the original is questionable but possibly irrelevant; it stands up well on its own. My copy of the play will now sit alongside, but at a respectful distance from, the old French’s Acting Edition copies of several Rattigan plays that have been gathering dust on my shelves. I may even feel encouraged take them to my comfortable old sofa and re-read them.
State Theatre Company and Frantic Assembly’s offering of Bovell’s THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE taps into our undying fascination with familial relationships, and the way in which they tackle it, taps into our hearts.