The Terence Rattigan season, which celebrates the centenary of the playwright's birth, is a prospect to savour if opening drama Flare Path (Radio 3, Sunday) is anything to go by. Written in 1941, it is set in a hotel that's a temporary home to RAF bomber crews and their loved ones.
It was a great introduction for anyone new to Rattigan, and in that sense a fine starting point. Jeremy Herrin's direction captured the play's warmth and understanding of these variously strained lives unfolding in the unique context of war. Rattigan doesn't pass judgment on his characters, even Patricia (Ruth Wilson) and her lover, Hollywood actor Peter (Rupert Penry-Jones), who intend to declare their feelings to her RAF pilot husband Teddy (Rory Kinnear) and leave. Instead of judging, Rattigan quietly tilts his characters away from that seeming possible.
The excellent ensemble cast relished the collision of closed worlds – the movies (everyone asks Peter if he knows any famous names) and the RAF, with its slang and lingo – where everyone, to an extent, is acting. There were terrifically moving moments, such as Penry-Jones reading a letter from a husband who is presumed dead to his wife (Doris, superbly played by Monica Dolan), but mostly just a sense of characters stoically adjusting to realities, written in cracking, sharp lines that always feel true.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
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