Terence Rattigan's play Man and Boy is reviewed

Man And Boy

Everyman Palace, Cork

A play built around one character, and therefore one performer, is always vulnerable to imbalance, and although David Suchet attacks his role in Man And Boy like a terrier at a fox hole his energetic flair can't quite disguise the psychological implausibility of almost everyone else in the piece.

Despite the claims made on its behalf it would be most unfair to Terence Rattigan to describe this as his masterpiece. It is a study of an international financier set in an age, between the two world wars, when such men came close to ruling a bewildered world.

It also purports to be a study of a father and son, but in this case the towering father's genius, mystique and motivation eclipse the son's inept ideology and revolt; it is impossible to understand from this production why the rediscovered young man so quickly agrees to help an absentee father escape the disgrace he deserves.

To understand the financier's power, and therefore the cataclysmic nature of his downfall, he must be shown against adversaries as diligent as himself. The dirt he digs up on his enemies - or partners - and the bait with which he entangles them in his vast net do not seem quite so potent these days (the play was written in 1961).

Rattigan's twin targets of financial and familial manoeuvrings are still immediate issues (remember Robert Maxwell?), but the subtlety of his style now needs more point, more purpose, from the rest of the cast.

This is not to say there are slack performances - anything but. There is always a great pleasure in the experience of a thoughtful, well-written play expertly directed and acted, and this pleasure, almost the true definition of relaxation as the audience allows itself to sink into the hands of the professionals, is offered in abundance here, with David Yelland, Emma Ferguson and Will Huggins leading a polished team.

Still the qualifications seep through the expertise, perhaps because Maria Aitken's direction is a little too reverent.

In Suchet's case, at least, she's probably right to be respectful: few actors can wrest such a dividend of insinuation from the title "speculator", even fewer can manage the almost Wildean aphorisms with which Rattigan could always illuminate his scripts, and in a play of the grand entrance and the grander exit fewer still can hold a silence, and a significance, with Suchet's grace.

Runs until Saturday

Mary Leland