South Downs/ The Browning Version, Harold Pinter Theatre - review

Rattigan's classic and David Hare's response triumph in a double bill transfer to the capital from Chichester
The Browning Version
21 July 2012

Two of theatre’s biggest success stories of last year were the Terence Rattigan centenary celebrations and Chichester Festival Theatre. The former took place all over the country and the latter, naturally, sits on the south coast, though its reach is increasingly spreading to London with triumphant recent transfers of Singin’ in the Rain and Sweeney Todd. This production, in which David Hare provides a beautiful new companion piece to Rattigan’s exquisite one-act Browning Version, united the two strands by premiering in Chichester last autumn and now, outstandingly, takes up its rightful place in the West End.

Both these school-set dramas cleverly revolve around unexpected acts of kindness, one seen from the perspective of a pupil and the other from that of a teacher. They show men of all ages emotionally adrift in our great public schools, but tentatively offer shards of hope for uncertain futures. In Hare’s dryly witty South Downs, confidently directed by Jeremy Herrin who himself enjoyed a soaring 2011, the teenage Blakemore (excellently played by newcomer Alex Lawther), socially awkward and poorer than his peers, can’t quite get the hang of fitting in. The prospect of change hovers in the early ‘60s air, but it’ s only Anna Chancellor’s glamorous actress, the mother of a well-meaning older pupil, who seems to comprehend the poor boy’s suffering. Hare perfectly captures the posturing, questioning and awkwardness of adolescence, and we only wish the piece could go on longer.

If it did, though, we wouldn’t get to The Browning Version, which would be disastrous as this play packs more truths about the human condition into 70 minutes than most other dramas could manage in a month. It centres on Andrew Crocker-Harris (Nicholas Farrell), a desiccated classics master about to retire on the grounds of ill-health, having been trampled over by everyone in his life both personally and professionally. Farrell’s marvellously controlled but lugubrious delivery shows a meticulous man poignantly aware of his failings as a teacher and a husband (Anna Chancellor’s sexually frustrated wife is having an affair with smoothy-chops colleague Mark Umbers), yet stoically unwilling to declare that he has been more sinned against than sinning. The silences in Angus Jackson’s fine production are increasingly freighted with weights of emotion. It’s a joy to welcome these theatrical gems to the capital.

South Downs and The Browning Version run until July 21 (0844 871 7622, browningversion.com)

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