Man and Boy

Synopsis

Powerful financier Gregor Antonescu visits his estranged son, Basil, at his Greenwich Village apartment in an attempt to extricated himself from the most catastrophic disaster of his career. After newspaper headlines report that the FBI is looking for Gregor, his wife and business associates desert him one by one. Only his son refuses to leave. Rattigan confronts the relationship between a father and son in this intriguing drama set in New York in the 1930s against a backdrop of love, betrayal and high finance.

Our Review:

8 February 2005

The plays of Terence Rattigan may have gone out of fashion after the new wave of “angry young men” playwrights were famously ushered in by the Royal Court in 1956 with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. But though Rattigan’s Man and Boy sometimes overeggs the melodrama, the playwright’s supreme craftsmanship and Maria Aitken’s meticulously well-observed revival wins through to re-claim this play from the relative obscurity in which it has mostly languished since it was originally premiered in 1963.

Both the qualities of the play and production are most brilliantly expressed in David Suchet’s riveting performance as a powerful but immoral businessman heading towards destruction as his past finally catches up with him. This is a chillingly poised performance that’s remorseless in revealing its character’s simultaneous ruthlessness towards others and lack of self-pity for himself.

Suchet is reason enough to see the play, but Aitken’s prod...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

82.43.173.80) - 14 April 2005:

Greatly overpraised; the best part of the play (the gay bit) was abandoned in Act 2, as were the most interesting characters, and we were left with a yawning anticlimax which even David Suchet with an un-smoking gun in his hand could not disguise. I found the wet son far more objectionable than the 'wicked' capitalist - an 'immoral' resolution would have been more satisfying but it seems Rattigan didn't have the guts for that. I wonder if the 'walking out the door' ending was written that way or just directed like that? What were we supposed to think happened next, apart from a hessitant curtain-call? This lost play should have stayed lost....

Read more and add your own review