Sebastian Cruttwell is a former intelligence officer, now a Marxist literary critic, and his wife Lydia, an Estonian survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who found asylum here in England. While Lydia is terminally ill, she chooses to conceal the truth from Sebastian—but Sebastian only pretends to be ignorant. Their mutual concealment maintains a fragile sense of peace, masked by their daily quarrels, until the arrival of their friend Mark, the very archetypal character of the play’s writer, Terence Rattigan. He seems to disturb this façade of peacefulness when the couple’s son Joey, an emerging writer with a struggling relationship with Sebastian, has his play debuted on BBC Two.
Written in the post-Vietnam 1970s, In Praise of Love touches on a plethora of themes including class, politics, Nazi camp trauma, and intergenerational disconnect. At its core, however, it is a meditation on the subtleties of Englishness: the reservation, repression, and restraint of emotional expression—even with their most loved ones. Here lies the famous Rattigan paradox: while the play explicitly criticises the English refusal to openly talk about their emotions, calling it “a vice,” the play’s most poignant charm is exactly contingent upon such reservation. Like a glass of vintage wine, the emotions grow richer and more textured through restraint, full of depth and aroma.
Unlike Long Day’s Journey into Night, its American parallel, the most powerful and emotionally compelling scenes of In Praise of Love lie in the nuanced push-and-pull of “s/he doesn’t know I already know.” As a closeted gay playwright in mid-20th-century Britain, Rattigan skilfully crafts his own feelings and perceptions into such contradiction. His characters’ incapability to speak about their truth and emotion is shaped both by English cultural norms and his own legacy of silence, where the most profound expressions of feelings are not those said, but those unsaid.
However, Amelia Sears’ rendition seems to struggle to capture this delicate nuance. In the first act, the dynamic between the couple leans too heavily into overt conflict, very akin to the Tyrone family, where the man is always selfish and egotistical, and the woman is uncomplainingly tolerant and quietly self-sacrificing, with a “don’t-you-dare-talk-to-your-father-like-that” maternal attitude to her son.
In that sense, Dominic Rowan’s Sebastian seems like an open book rather than a figure of concealment. His overtly boastful nostalgia for the past, cynical disdain for British politics, and domineering attitude toward Lydia all too transparently suggest that he is covering something up, rather than reinforcing the stereotype of the literary critic.
Abigail Price’s rendition of Lydia is reminiscent of Patricia Clarkson’s Mary Tyrone in the recent West End revival—both tender yet resilient, but with a wryly evasive and playful wit. While Daniel Abelson resembles a 1970s American masculine writer and millionaire, Joe Edgar’s Joey could probably be the most “English” character, faithfully portraying a next-generation politically disillusioned idealist with reserved emotional expression.
Sears’ rendition could be an attempt to “liberate” the Rattigan paradox into a more explicit, even radical, interpretation, but there seems to be a mismatch in terms of theatrical language. While the intimate space of the Orange Tree Theatre bears much potential for the “reservation to explosion” trajectory, the overall production feels strangely lukewarm and bland. Peter Butler’s half-realistic, half-symbolic design of the Cruttwells’ living room is accompanied by a minimalist soundscape (Elizabeth Purnell) and lighting (Bethany Gupwell) that only provide minimal impact on the acts’ openings and closures. In several moments, the production attempts to highlight Lydia’s inner softness and sincerity by having her silently caress her loved ones under a cold white-blue spotlight. But in such a close, intimate space rather than a proscenium, this feels rather cringeworthy and flattens Lydia’s eventual revelation as trivial and unimportant.
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