After The Dance
By Mark Schofield  – Head of Drama

Over the past few years the Drama Department have staged French, Spanish, Italian and American classics and we felt it was high time we staged a great English play.  Rattigan is often thought of as the exemplar of English emotional restraint, but as he so clearly reveals in After The Dance, he is actually its fiercest critic.

 Written shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, Rattigan's play is partly an attack on the feckless hedonism that followed the earlier global conflict. His characters, drinking their lives away in the Mayfair of 1938, are the not-so-bright, not-so-young things sleepwalking into another catastrophe. His hero, David Scott-Fowler, is a popular historian more concerned with writing bad books about King Bomba of Naples than addressing the present crisis. And the plot revolves around a salvage-attempt by the earnest Helen who, in order to rescue David from physical and creative death, coolly shatters his 12-year-long marriage. What she doesn't bargain for is either David's moral inertia or his wife's unspoken love.

Although not a well-known play, it was virtually forgotten for sixty years, I was drawn to its profound understanding of the human heart. David's wife, Joan, greets the news of his defection with stoic, unruffled calm; only gradually do we realise the power of a passion she was afraid to declare.   The cast worked as a terrific ensemble highlighting the English vice of emotional repression;   James Bowen’s outwardly jovial David and Anna Godfrey’s elegant hostessy Joan kept up their emotional guard, only revealing their shared love when it was far too late. Alex Day’s Helen also exuded the iron determination of the destructive idealist, and there was terrific support from Alex Bowen and Josh Freeborn as veteran socialites.

Graham Carey (Drama Department) created a remarkable interior of the Scott Fowler’s fourth floor Mayfair flat and design team of Upper Sixth Art and Theatre Studies students designed the stunning costumes under the auspices of visiting professional Helen Guy Williams.
The National Theatre is to stage the play in June and the cast are looking forward to reuniting to see the show.