Stage review: After The Dance, National Theatre

After The Dance was a critical success on its opening, but a commercial failure. Perhaps people had other matters on their minds with the date of the first night - June 1939 - a clue to their preoccupation.

War was just around the corner and, while the young Terence Rattigan was receiving "he's done it again" style notices in the press for his stylish and witty social critique, the German High Command was completing its timetable for Hitler's invasion of Poland.

Stung by the lack of a long run Rattigan deliberately omitted After The Dance from his Collected Plays in 1953 and so the legend of the "lost masterpiece" was born - although it has been revived before.

But never, surely, with the confidence and subtlety of Thea Sharrock's production at the National.

The timing, among a welter of other attributes, is spot on. After The Dance, set in the '30s, is a long lament for the golden days of unfettered indulgence and their imminent suffocation in a cloud of doom. The party's over and hard times are just around the corner.

As George Osborne sets the foundations for a new age of austerity, the sense of hangover and lost opportunity has an eerie relevance.

Joan and David Scott-Fowler married in a whirlwind of merriment in those carefree days of the '20s but now they find themselves entombed in party personas that no longer hold any truth or resonance.

With the shrill arrogance of youth, Helen Banner (a pert Faye Castelow) sets about repairing the drink-damaged David and sets in train a series of calamities that tease the fissures of the fragile Scott-Fowler marriage and ruins her own relationship with the idealistic Peter (John Heffernan).

The ensemble cast, in Hildegard Bechtler's simple but beautiful Mayfair setting, is quietly and effortlessly brilliant. Adrian Scarborough received an extra decibel of applause for his portrayal of parasitic chum John Reid, a court jester able to tell truths through a fug of whisky fumes.

Nancy Carroll's Joan catches the quiet despair of her predicament with a moment of heart-rending stillness amid a bustle of fabricated jollity.

Benedict Cumberbatch is rich, regal and mellifluous as David. He fancies he has another life beyond the shallow bon viveur but slowly discovers his hinterland is not as rich and deep as he had fondly imagined.

Cumberbatch remains haughty and self-absorbed yet still earns sympathy as the wire trap cuts deeper every time he tries to wriggle free.

The cast is served by an impeccable piece of writing. Rattigan understands structure, pacing, revelation and consequence. He places a vase teetering on the mantelpiece and he knows when to pull it back and when to send it crashing to the floor. His setpieces are marvellously understated yet wonderfully cathartic.

The playwright will be celebrated during the centenary of his birth in 2011 and, if this masterclass is an appetiser of what is to come, then there may yet be diamonds in the dust of austerity.

– From June 2010