If last year's Terence Rattigan centenary has piqued your interest in the playwright and you've got some aversion to reading Michael Darlow's excellent 'Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work', then Giles Cole's new drama, subtitled 'The Life of Terence Rattigan', covers most of the major biographical bases in a couple of hours.
Really, though, this exposition-heavy work is more made-for-TV life story than classy big screen biopic. Dominic Tighe and Alistair Findlay play Rattigan as a young and old man respectively; though Cole's play covers 48 years of Rattigan's life, from schooldays to the very end, it's Tighe who has the most to do, with the bulk of the action revolving around the closeted Rattigan hanging out with his queeny BFFs Freddie and Cuthbert, occasionally breaking off to agonise over his post-1956 career decline and the lovers he can't bring himself to publically acknowledge.
It's chocka with biographical detail, but much of it is shoehorned in very awkwardly indeed, while the tone of Knight Mantell's production, which veers between high camp humour and florid melodrama, feels like poor tribute to a master of exquisite understatement.