You would think that the breathless moment would be the roar of Wellington bombers taking off under a full moon as wives stand by the window. That’s strong — and the cloudy projection reminds us that when writing is good, simple stagings work. But the real gulp is provoked by a pair of reading glasses reluctantly donned as ill-matched strangers sit in an empty pub. Classic Rattigan: undemonstrative emotional catharsis.
In this all-but-forgotten wartime play the catharsis was his own. In 1941, blocked and depressed after one success and one relative failure, he was an RAF tail-gunner, snatching a torn draft from his notebook in a crippled plane.
It deals with young bomber crews who flew by night through flames of death, yet by day drank pints in English pubs. Unlike sailors or soldiers they could not retreat into tight military comradeship: daily they saw, and nightly risked losing, the world that they fought for. Banter staved off breakdown.
Terence Rattigan’s fresh experience of duty, fear, comradeship and loneliness fed the play so powerfully — despite the simplicity of its love-triangle — that one fellow airman expressed “shock, that he had seen so deeply into us”.
London wartime audiences responded to its emotional truth, but later it faded: by the Sixties, remember, the mustachioed RAF barfly saying “wizard prang” was a figure of fun. Only lately has our sensibility changed.
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So we are ready for this production: willing to be dragged with power, humour and truth out of whining modernity into a mindset where duty trumps desire. It is a triumph, and not only for Trevor Nunn (heaven knows he deserved a good war, after struggling with the dismal Birdsong).
Sienna Miller is the actress wife planning to leave her puppyish, superficially larky airman, Teddy (Harry Hadden-Paton), for a Hollywood smoothy, (James Purefoy). I would say that, despite her irritatingly 21st-century hairstyle, this marks her acceptance as a grown-up stage actress, expressing truthful feeling beyond the glamorous image.
But even better is Sheridan Smith — winner last night of an Olivier award for Legally Blonde. She is wonderful as the barmaid married to a Polish airman: naive, cheerful, yet radiating immense doubt and pain in stillness. Like Hadden-Paton she has the hard task of portraying decent, ordinary, unclouded, youthful response: both are superb.
Purefoy is subtle, too, as the selfish and insensitive Hollywood star who needs a shock (maybe that’s why Broadway disliked it). But the joy of the play, and of Nunn’s careful, honest production, is that every fringe character gets both warm laughs and proper dignity: the sergeant’s laundress wife, the potboy, the sniffing landlady.
This is not Brief Encounter’s creepy middle-class patronising of the lower orders. Rattigan’s people are in it together.
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It is nearly three hours and, for all its complex emotion, the ending is not bleak but unexpectedly uproarious. A modern playwright would have stopped 15 minutes earlier, on a downbeat. But in terrible times, people do joke and sing. That’s where hope lies and, for all his mastery of pain, Rattigan always looked for it.
Box office 0845 4811870; to June 4