Love in Idleness

In Sir Terence Rattigan’s charming romantic comedy, a middle-aged widow, Olivia, who ‘lives in sin’ – risqué stuff in the Forties when this play is set – with separated but not-yet- divorced Sir John Fletcher, a Tory cabinet minister, chooses between her jealous leftie 18-year-old son and her lover. Towards the end, Olivia and John embrace passionately and widow, lover and son decide to dine, à trois, at The Dorchester. On opening night, the audience at the Apollo burst into a spontaneous and rather moving round of applause, suggesting that audiences are a soppy old lot, but specially so when it comes to happy endings for retreads of a certain age.

Few will have seen this play, which is seldom revived because, frankly, Rattigan’s idea to rework Hamlet (son furious at Mummy’s new relationship so soon after Daddy’s death) was not one of his best. His first stab was titled Less Than Kind, which is how Hamlet feels towards his new stepfather. His second attempt, Love In Idleness, named after the flower from which the magic potion was made that caused the romantic chaos in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lightened things up for the better. Sir Trevor Nunn’s production conflates the two, not entirely successfully, for one’s credulity remains as strained as the play’s political aspirations. It’s hard to believe that glamorous Olivia would have sacrificed the high life with Sir John in order to make dried-egg omelettes in Barons court for whining mummy’s boy Michael. But then, on the other hand, would Michael really have abandoned his socialist principles for cash to splash on wine and women? Maybe, if the woman is as bewitching to a young fellow as Charlotte Spencer’s lipsticked lovely – if not in a piece in which Beveridge announces the birth of the NHS on Pathé newsreel, and the same boy thinks Laski’s labour tracts are a ‘corking’ read.

Still, a delectably comic Eve Best pulls off the impossible as a stunningly superficial, and yet always more than skin-deep, Olivia, who insists that ‘there’s no situation in the world that can’t be passed off with small talk’, and then goes on to prove it with the unexpected appearance of her lover’s wife. Olivia’s candour makes her irresistibly lovable, freely admitting that her love for Sir John can’t be separated from the grandeur that comes with it. She adores playing the hostess with the mostest – saving up rations for dinner parties by dining out at the savoy! And she is miserably torn between being an indulged mistress and slummy mummy.

A splendid Anthony Head is sensible, sensitive, as well as sardonic, as Sir John and Edward Bluemel’s arrogant and anguished Michael combines slappability and sweetness, usually at the same time. Slightly corked, but absolutely corking.

Until 1 July at the Apollo Theatre, London WC1. Box office: 0330-333 4809, www.apollotheatrelondon.co.uk