Review: MAN AND BOY, National Theatre

If anyone still believed the Angry Young Men-era narrative of Terence Rattigan as a staid drawing room playwright, his gritty, darkly comic 1963 play Man and Boy ought to put an end to that belief. Anthony Lau’s new version doesn’t always elevate the source material to its full potential, but it presents a compelling case for giving the oft-forgotten text another look.

Ben Daniels is Gregor Antonescu, a post-Depression Romanian “Monopoly capitalist” on the brink of ruin after his gaming of the stock market for once doesn’t quite go to plan. His solution is to provide his estranged son Vassily (Laurie Kynaston), a carefree young socialist in Greenwich Village who’s renamed himself ‘Basil’, as a sexual reward for a powerful businessman in exchange for turning a blind eye to his fraud.

Daniels moves catlike around the stage, wheedling his way out of any potential critique of his behaviour (whether that be buying aristocratic titles or cosying up to Stalin). A particularly memorable sequence sees him skip nimbly across two dining tables explaining financial concepts to Vassily’s girlfriend Carol (played with gregarious naivety by House of the Dragon’s Phoebe Campbell). This easy physicality makes his eventual physical and mental collapse in the second act all the more visceral.

The timeliness of this story of casual exploitation and flying too close to the sun needs no explanation, in a week marked by a new tranche of Epstein files. Beneath the more obvious social commentary, though, Man and Boy is about the interplay between father and son. Gregor casts a long, contentious shadow, and neither he nor Vassily can step out from the shadow for long enough to understand one another; the result is a father who cannot accept his son’s protection, and a son who will both take revenge on his father and help to justify his legacy.

Lau’s fluid style of direction fits the source material perfectly; furniture is freely moved around, creating inventive spaces within a tiny stage, and conversations taking place in the same room can feel worlds apart. The result is watchable enough to paper over some sections where the script loses momentum, including the long retellings of financial crimes, and the scenes involving Gregor’s wife, played as a thin caricature of a scorned aristocrat by Isabella Laughland.

Set and costume designer Georgia Lowe has embraced the spirit of New York’s Art Deco heyday, with everything draped in velvet curtains beneath vintage spotlights, and characters constantly shedding their suspenders and vests like ideological snakeskin. Stylish though this showiness is, it sometimes feels like a distraction from the otherwise intimate staging, as does the gaudy cinema-style cast list on the back wall (a comment on the lives of the super-rich as endless performance, or a reminder to critics of how to spell everyone’s names?).

In their haste to prove the relevance of Man and Boy, Lau and his team have perhaps over-gilded the lily. When some of the unnecessary artifice is stripped away, however, this is an astutely written drama the National were right to revisit.

Man and Boy plays at the National Theatre until 14 March

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