Crimped hair, crimped vowels and crimped morals: Terence Rattigan’s centenary has brought pre-sexual revolution theatre back into vogue. Wartime weepie ‘Flare Path’ is currently moistening eyes at the Haymarket. And now the Old Vic revisits an inglorious episode of cougar-bashing by the pre-war popular press in ‘Cause Célèbre’, Rattigan’s semi-fictional take on the 1935 trial of Alma Rattenbury and her 18-year-old chauffeur for her husband’s murder.
Anne-Marie Duff throws herself into the role of Alma with reckless sensual abandon. From the moment she slinks down the stairs in silk pyjamas to give her new chauffeur George (Tommy McDonnell) his first ‘gin and it’, she shimmers with neurotic bohemian appeal. George is underwritten: a brutal bit of rough. But Duff’s Alma is feverishly plausible as an affectionate sexpot, who can neither fight nor flee when caught in the twin headlights of horror and notoriety.
Director Thea Sharrock won an Olivier for her revival of Rattigan’s ‘After the Dance’ at the National Theatre in 2010. Here, her emphatic approach makes this more schematic play seem reductive.
It was written for radio, and the structure – courtroom drama with flashbacks – is awkward, especially in Hildegard Bechtler’s split-level design, which swallows the details.
Rattigan uses the trial to compare and contrast Alma (warm, sinful, human) with a fictional, frigid jury forewoman, Edith Davenport, who delivers rigid verdicts on her erring husband and son.
Niamh Cusack has a prim unforgiving, character in Edith, but I was often more aware of her enunciation than her emotions. Thanks to rising star Freddy Fox, Edith’s teenage son Tony is a hearfelt, subtle study in ‘Brideshead’-style floppy-fringed angst. But their relationship could be more ambivalent and fascinating.
Courtroom scenes are inevitably static and rarely intimate. There is humanely petty comedy in the backroom rivalry of the lawyers. But, as you might expect from a play set in the ’30s and written in the ’70s by a playwright who was big in the ’40s, this is uneven in tone – not the best way to champion Rattigan’s cause.