Man and Boy
7.30pm, Duchess Theatre, Catherine Street, WC2. £20-£40. Tube: Covent Garden. Tel: 0870 890 1103
Terence Rattigan's forgotten drama of high financial swindles and low moral dives is restored to theatrical life in a blaze of vitality after 40 years mouldering in oblivion. Man And Boy sank beneath waves of apathy and bemusement at its 1963 premiere.
Ben Silverstone's frightfully English pianist Basil and his American actress girlfriend, Carol, are scarcely out of bed when the past catches up on them in the form of Basil's father, Gregor Antonescu (David Suchet), whose business empire faces collapse.
We expect a typical father-andson clash of values - yet it is the play's portrayal of destructive power relations that matters. Rattigan stages the strangest, most dramatic of seduction scenes in service of this theme. Gregor uses his son's flat to hold a meeting about a merger with Mark Herris, the homosexual president of American Electric.
Like some diabolical magician, he plans to persuade Mark into a deal by passing himself off as secretly gay, with Basil as his lover. Gregor thus supervises the sexing up of his unknowing son and shows him off before Colin Stinton's appreciative president in a scene which cuts to the dark heart of the matter.
David Suchet's enthralling portrayal of evil in action helps us to realise that Rattigan wrote no more shocking or provocative drama than this.
