The Xtra Diary - Kind memories of playwright Terence Rattigan live on
Published: 28 January, 2011
DIARY joined a first night party for a play by the dramatist Terence Rattigan at the great man’s residence in The Albany – the famous chambers that have counted among their residents Lord Palmerston, Aldous Huxley and Ted Heath.
Rattigan’s flat is now the home of Heath’s former private secretary Antony Fletcher, a generous host for the Friday evening gathering.
By sheer coincidence Fletcher is also the name of the main character in Less Than Kind, which is currently playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre.
Rattigan, who died in 1977, wrote this drama more than 60 years ago, but the original version has never been produced before.
The old Royal typewriter on which Rattigan wrote Less Than Kind takes pride of place as a prop and next Tuesday a clutch of dons will be making the trip down from Oxford – where Rattigan studied – to attend the theatre, which has been bought out for the night by the bursar of Trinity College.
Among those who attended the party was Princess Jean Galitzine, a former model descended from the medieval sovereigns of Lithuania and Belarus. She was friends with Rattigan and holidayed with him in 1957 in Majorca.
Though regarded by some as subversive, Rattigan enjoyed hobnobbing with establishment figures, Adrian Brown his friend and partner told me.
Brown recalled: “Men in dirty overalls would jeer at him as he drove by in his Rolls-Royce and he would shout back, ‘I’ve earned it!’”
The play itself is about battles over ethics between industrialist-turned-reactionary politician Sir John Fletcher, and a young man called Brown, probably after his partner.
Brown told me: “Fletcher was based on Lord Beaverbrook. Rattigan’s older women were always his mother and the young man in the play, I suppose, would have been Rattigan himself.”
Of Ted Heath, Fletcher recalled: “Heath didn’t do small talk. I never said, ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it,’ because he would look out of the window, see if I was right and wonder to himself why on earth I had mentioned it.”
Critical acclaim - Theatre world squares up to Circle!
ACTORS and directors this week came face to face with the people who are sometimes branded as their bitterest foes – the theatre critics!
Members of the Critics’ Circle nominate figures from Theatreland for prizes at their annual awards event, held at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Piccadilly. Winners this year included David Suchet – named Best Actor for his performance in All My Sons – and Jenny Jules, who clinched the Best Actress award for her part in Ruined.
A Most Promising Newcomer Award went to 22-year-old Daniel Kaluuya for his role in Sucker Punch, a drama set in a boxing ring.
Daniel, who trained for three months and lost three stone while preparing for the role, said: “I fully immersed myself in it. I used to be a bit tubby and I had to somehow become a boxer and learn how to fight. I was playing someone who was like Muhammad Ali.”
Nineteen-year-old scriptwriter Anya Reiss won the Most Promising Playwright award for Spur of the Moment, which played at the Royal Court.
She offered some words of advice to young people keen to emulate her success. “This is going to sound naff,” she said, “but write and finish a play. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I really want to write, I have started a few things’. But you have to get to the end of something before you can know what you are about.”
For the second year running, the Royal Court dominated the awards, clinching a third of all prizes.
Chairman Mark Shenton hosted and the compere was comic Arthur Smith, who lived up to his grumpy old man image. He called the event “by some measure the least glamourous of the award ceremonies and the least well-dressed”.
The Victorians were far out, man
TIE-DYE psychedelia is something most people associate with the Swinging Sixties. But underneath its cloak of buttoned-up respectability, Victorian Britain was a hallucinatory jumble of dizzying drug mania to rival so-called “far out” decades.
Opium, morphine, cocaine and cannabis were widely available in high street shops and the advances of science – combined with unfettered global trade – had made drugs more potent than ever before.
Victorian drug use and attempts at prohibition will be among the subjects examined at a mind-expanding symposium at the Wellcome Collection in Euston Road next month.
The event, which will include a magic lantern performance with piano accompaniment and lectures by leading historians, ties in with the collection’s current exhibition, High Society.
It will take place on Friday February 11, from 7-9pm, and Saturday February 12, from 10.30am-5.30pm. Tickets cost £30. Concessionary and early bird rates are available. Call 020 7611 2222 to book.