Flare path

Unlike Our Country's Good, I suspect there was a good Terrence Rattigan play inside this production, trying to get out. But not succeeding. Its rare to find a production so easy to criticise as this. The acting was generally pretty poor - it felt more like an amateur dramatic production than a professional theatre company. And it was so hammed up that one spent the first half hour or so thinking this was a spoof but waiting for the first joke.

The play is set in a country hotel during the Second World War outside an RAF camp. One difficulty is all the real drama, the flying, bombing etc can only be told in narrative form after the event, since the entire play is set in the hotel lobby. The residents include the brave RAF pilot's wife, the wife of a Polish Count (and now a pilot of course) and the girlfriend of the rear-gunner. But the catalyst for the play is the arrival of a cinema matinee idol who was the boyfriend of the pilot's wife.

The meat of the play is that the pilot's wife realises that she loved the matinee idol all along, except that when the pilot goes on a raid and miraculously gets his crew back home safely, but then admits to her that he is scared all along but can't show it, she realises that he is the one for her after all, and lets down the matinee idol. The drama is really in seeing the film actor at the beginning as the lucky one compared to everyone else in the war, but then ending up as the sad character as he loses the girl and we are also told his career is coming to an end. So he has everything but is actually about to have nothing.

But the drama is lost amongst the spiffing accents and staging of the play, with the comic book working class bar boy and receptionist. far too much of this play is targeted at exaggerating the upper class stiff upper lips, the plucky working class gunner the comic but well meaning lower orders. This just distracts from a story of bravery, love and loss. That's not to say all that class distinction stuff isn't in the original play; its just that a for a modern audience rather than a 1940s one it needs to be toned down Or else it sounds like a parody as that is what we have become used to in sketch shows.

And if anyone can do a worse Polish accent than the Polish pilot I really wouldn't like to hear it.