After the Dance by Terence Rattigan Directed by Christopher Newton

“Whatever people may have said about us when we were young, they could never have said we were bores.”

It’s 1938 and David and Joan Scott-Fowler are not the Bright Young Things they once were. As much as they try to live a life of parties and frivolity, the world is moving forward and they must either move ahead with it or remain stuck in a time and place that no longer exists.

Within the play, two generations are represented – the generation of the Scott-Fowlers are the ones that just missed the horrors of World War I and enjoyed the fun and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. Helen, a young woman of the next generation, tries to speak to David about why he and his friends live their lives of excess, why he drinks too much, why he and Joan can’t stop playing old records, why they can’t stop talking about the good old days. She asks if it was the war, and David bites back:

“Oh, Lord, the war! The horrors of the trenches – the blood, the mud – my best friend killed in my arms – the memory of it haunting me still. Helen, will you try get this into your novelettish little mind. I wasn’t even in the war. I missed it by a whole bloody month.”

But for Helen, it’s not the fact of having experienced the war, but what it did to his generation:

“You see, when you were eighteen you didn’t have anybody of twenty-two or twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five to help you, because they’d been wiped out. And anyone over forty you wouldn’t listen to, anyway. The spotlight was on you and you alone, and you weren’t even young men, you were children …You had a hell of a good time – with all the money in the world and everyone beaming on you and applauding your antics.”

And while Helen is engaged to David’s young and somewhat earnest cousin, she becomes more and more concerned with David’s lifestyle. Eventually her zeal turns to love and when he confesses that he has fallen in love with her as well, they de- cide to marry. David reassures Helen that he and Joan had never really been in love, “She won’t show any emotion at all,” he tells her, “She’ll probably be rude to you, in a vague sort of way.” What neither of them realize is that Joan is deeply in love with David and the news devastates her. And the party does finally come to an end with shattering results.

When the play opened in 1939, it received glowing reviews, noting that this was a ‘different’ Terence Rattigan than the writer of the farcical comedy French Without Tears which had been his first big hit. After only sixty performances however, the play closed. Always hyper-sensitive to criticism and fearful of failure, Rattigan omitted it from his Collected Plays, not wanting to spoil his claim of having written five hit plays in a row. Rattigan himself became a less popular playwright in the 1950s when writers like John Osborne rose in popularity. When asked on the first night of the Royal Court’s production of Look Back in Anger what he thought of the play, Rattigan replied, “I don’t know why Mr Osborne didn’t title it ‘Look How Unlike Terence Rattigan I’m Being’.”

But now his work, and this play in particular, are being rediscovered by audiences and artists. Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole, who directed a highly acclaimed production of After the Dance in 2002, wrote about Rattigan:

“In these two qualities, hard love and craftsmanship, Rattigan ran the last leg of the relay that began with Wilde, then followed with Maugham, then Coward. They also shared a taste for the sharp line and the good laugh. It’s extraordinary how these four men, punished for the direction of their hearts, revenged themselves on the society that oppressed them by becoming the foremost chroniclers of that society for 70 years.”

Our production will be directed by Shaw's Artistic Director Emeritus Christopher Newton, who last season directed St John Hankin's The Cassilis Engagement to overwhelming audience and critical acclaim.