Last Updated on February 12, 2026
Rattigan Redux
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
We are in the throes of something approaching a Terence Rattigan revival. Last year, The Deep Blue Sea came to London from Bath with Tamsin Greig in the lead role and received flattering reviews, and In Praise of Love ran for a month at the Orange Tree in Richmond. There has even been a push led by David Suchet, president of the Terence Rattigan Society, to rename one of the London theatres after the great master of upper-middle-class repression. Now the new Director of the National Theatre, Indhu Rubasingham, has chosen Rattigan’s Man and Boy as her first show at the Dorfman. Something must be in the air…
Man and Boy is a late work in Rattigan’s oeuvre, first staged in 1963. The play is a tense domestic chamber piece located within the world of international finance. Set in 1934, Man and Boy reflects Rattigan’s interest in moral corruption and damaged families against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. It was his response to the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the British theatre who emerged in the 1950s.
Man and Boy opened at the Queen’s Theatre, London, on 4 September 1963, before transferring to Broadway, with French star Charles Boyer as the charismatic financier Gregor Antonescu. To Rattigan’s dismay, the original production of Man and Boy was poorly received, achieving only a limited London run and a brief life on Broadway. The author had become a lightning rod for criticism as his unfashionable craftsmanship was overtaken by the new writing. Maria Aitken directed a London revival in 2005 starring David Suchet as Antonescu, which was widely praised, helping to restore Man and Boy’s standing. Since then, there was a starry 2011 Broadway production with Frank Langella and Adam Driver, and now this new National Theatre staging.
The story unfolds in a shabby Greenwich Village apartment belonging to Basil Anthony, an indifferent bar pianist. Basil has cut himself off from his famous father, Gregor Antonescu, a Romanian-born international money man hailed as “the greatest financier in the world”. As a catastrophic business deal threatens to destroy Antonescu’s empire, he descends on Basil’s flat with his fixer Sven, turning the cramped room into an improvised boardroom where he schemes to salvage a vital merger with Mark Herries, head of American Electrics. Over the course of one evening, Antonescu attempts one last manipulation, using his son as a pawn by allowing Herries to believe Basil is his young lover, exposing Gregor’s ruthless opportunism and the emotional cost of his ambition. The play’s tension lies in the clash between Gregor’s dazzling, amoral charisma and Basil’s lingering, painful love, as both men are forced to confront the hollowness of success and the impossibility of redemption. Rattigan’s own father, Frank, had to resign from his diplomatic career, having had an affair with a Romanian princess, so the idea of patriarchal betrayal was a familiar one to Rattigan.
Sitting in the theatre before the show, we were regaled with a selection of 1930s big band favourites. I was expecting a mannered period piece, but then, as the lights lowered, an epic Bernard Herrmann-esque score thundered out, sharply changing the mood. Director Anthony Lau has placed the action not so much in the round as in the rectangle. The audience looks on from all sides at a bare-bones stage with a carpet that looks like a snooker table’s green baize. Three oblong tables act as symbolic stage furniture, and there’s a piano in a corner. What takes place is a series of confrontations as the unfolding off-stage developments impact the characters who square off against each other like prizefighters. To further heighten this expressionistic illusion, the actors’ names light up as they appear on stage, as if on the marquee at the boxing venue Madison Square Garden.
Ben Daniels gives a virtuoso performance as Gregor Antonescu, one in a long line of emotionally unavailable Rattigan leading men. Both sociopathic and narcissistic, Daniels dominates the stage in his maroon 3-piece suit and unlikely worker’s boots, hyper-stimulated on uppers after three days with no sleep. He preens, prowls, roars, manipulates, and bullies, reliant on his catch phrase “liquidity and confidence” to allow him to feed off the rotten heart of speculative capitalism. Noone is allowed to get close to him – “Love is a commodity that I can’t afford”. It’s a career-defining role that should garner prizes for Daniels and set him up for hyper-villainous leading roles.
Laurie Kynaston gives a touching performance as Antonescu’s estranged son, Basil Anthony. A naïve, “soft”, socialist lush, Kynaston convinces as a boy-man in a needy childlike state, numbing his pain with alcohol and music and is desperate for his father’s approval.
Phoebe Campbell makes a good stab at a nasal Brooklyn accent as Carol Penn, Basil‘s good-hearted actress girlfriend. Swishing around the stage in long pants, Carol is the sanest of the characters on stage and an appealingly comedic presence, certainly saner than Antonescu’s wingman enabler and fixer, the grey-suited Sven Johnson, played with a superficial sense of calm by Nick Fletcher. Sven is completely invested in Antonescu’s fate, with the two of them dancing maniacally as they sense the possibility of escape from the inevitable.
Malcolm Sinclair convinces as Mark Herries, a creepy, closeted gay business leader who holds Antonescu’s fate in his hands. Less convincing is Isabella Laughland’s Countess Antonescu, a platinum blonde plucked out of obscurity from the typing pool who understands that “All I’m really good for is sex and signatures”. Her accent is too English and sensibility too modern for this period piece.
Rattigan was out of time when Man and Boy first came out, with the critical tide having turned against him and his perceived emotional sterility. But this play is nothing of the sort. The writing bristles with a muscular, comedic vitality, and in the character of Antonescu the author has created one of the great monsters of the dramatic stage of that, as Michael Billington in the Times pointed out, looks forward to Anthony Hopkins’ Lambert Le Roux in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda from the 1980s and more contemporary characters such as Brian Cox’s Logan Roy in Succession. Man and Boy is a terrific and visceral piece of theatre that still resonates today.
Until 14 March 2026
Dorfman Theatre
National Theatre
South Bank
London SE1 9PX
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