Man and Boy review, Dorfman Theatre – Jarringly sober super-rich satire has lost its scandalous edge

The great 20th-century playwright Terence Rattigan began his career cheering up embattled wartime audiences with perky comedies like French Without Tears. That levity famously drained away as the century wore on, but even so, there’s something jarringly sombre about Man and Boy, his seldom-revived late-career study of a misanthropic financier’s downfall. When it premiered in 1963, critics were scandalised by the sight of a father offering up his son as a toyboy to a millionaire business associate. Anthony Lau’s new production tests its 21st-century audience in different ways. We’re used to seeing tales of evil rich men leavened by Bond-style plot twists or Succession-esque satirical flourishes – instead, Rattigan’s play unfurls soberly and without remorse for either characters or audience.

Rattigan wrote this play in a Britain that was finally starting to boom again after the bleak post-war years. And perhaps it was his way of warning of the crash that could come, if his country cast off its staid financial principles in favour of the US’s capitalist free-for-all. Man and Boy is set in the crushing poverty of Depression-era Manhattan, where struggling pianist Basil (Laurie Kynaston) and his actor girlfriend Carol (Phoebe Campbell) are scratching out bohemian lives for themselves in rakish Greenwich Village. Then, there’s an unexpected guest at the door, highlighted by a flashing sign that reads “knock knock”.

Designer Georgia Lowe takes her visual cues from 1930s showbiz, with a giant metatheatrical marquee overhead that illuminates character names when they enter (unfortunately, thanks to the layout of the auditorium, half the audience can’t see it). It feels like we’re in an unusually slow-moving backstage drama, so it’s disconcerting when the disgraced multi-millionaire financier we’ve been hearing about on the radio crashes into this world – and announces that Basil is actually his estranged son, Vassily, in hiding from the wealthy world that raised him.

Ben Daniels brings a compellingly lean, troubled, otherworldly energy to Gregor Antonescu, a man gradually being strangled by the intricate web of financial dirty dealings that he’s woven about himself. As he expounds the virtues of liquidity in stock markets, he flexes his biceps and his veins seem to become a visual metaphor for the money that pulses around the world, like blood. Rattigan paces things artfully but frustratingly slowly, leaving the audience scrambling to work out what this dangerous-seeming man wants with his puppyish son. Is it reconciliation? Or retribution?

To the playwright, the super-rich are people unmoored, hopelessly incapable of making human connections. There’s a purity to Antonescu’s desires. He doesn’t want to buy love, or beautiful things. He just wants to make his mark on the world’s doings. So when his wife, Countess Antonescu, belatedly appears, her scenes are a bit of a shock. Isabella Laughland is typically hilarious in the role, sashaying onto the stage in an extravagant mink that she drops to the floor like a discarded crisp packet wrapper, before making camp little ripostes to her husband in her rakish white satin pyjamas. She’s the only one here who enjoys having money, clearly, but her role (like Carol’s) feels cruelly underwritten. No one in this play has the intellectual heft or bravery to remotely challenge Antonescu, and that makes it ultimately unsatisfying to watch.

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The play’s final scenes clatter onto the stage like a handful of dropped coins, refreshingly swift after a story that’s otherwise been starved of action and tension. Lau’s production tries to inject a bit of energy by getting the actors to clamber incongruously over tables, or by crushing them under a lighting grid that descends worryingly close to the stage, or by having them sway in dim light like they’re in a slo-mo fight scene. These witty touches are refreshing – but they feel like a bit of a mismatch with Rattigan’s serious portrait of moral corruption, which offers more to respect than to enjoy.

‘Man and Boy’ is on at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre until 14 March