For lovers of French without Tears, but not for admirers of the Browning Version, Man and Boy might be a surprise. Like both its forbears it is a superbly plotted play with telling dialogue and strong characters. But like The Browning Version there is a deeper sense of tragedy and a bleaker picture of the human condition lurking well beyond the convenient epithet 'well-made'.
     Man and Boy has two main characters: an idealistic young man who is struggling unsuccessfully to escape the emotional and physical clutches of his father, a ruthless, no-principled, self-seeking plutocrat poised on the brink of ruin. His father's ruin would be the making of Basil Anthony (the Americanised version of his original Romanian Vassily Antonescu), but he has not yet the strength to abandon his father who mercilessly exploits this reluctance in a last bid to save his crumbling financial empire. In 1961 Rattigan must have had some real-life candidates in mind, but today it is not difficult to find echoes of single-minded entrepreneurs such as Robert Maxwell, and such corruption as Ceacescu, ironically also Romanian.
      From the start Rattigan realised the key role was the financially corrupt Gregor Antonescu. At first he thought of Rex Harrison, but the creation of the role eventually fell to the suavely slight Charles Boyer. For both these actors the real problem of the play was not portraying the ruthless business-man but the fact that he disguises his son to look like a young gay lover and thus dupe by oblique blackmail Mark Herris, the fellow entrepreneur whose illicit gay love-affair Antonescu has discovered.
      David Suchet is perfect, almost creepily compelleing, as the corrupt tycoon, Gregor Antonescu. His menace is prophsied before his entry, and his presence confirms it. His affection for his son perfectly hovers between animal love and innate exploitation. But his amorality prevents his allowing the former to dominate the latter and in the end his well-honed manipulativeness wins, chillingly portrayed in the scene where he choses the casual clothes his son should wear to suggest to the tycoon who is to ruin his business that this is his clandestine lover. Words such love and affectionate touching have different meanings to all concerned when they meet and Ben Silverstone's reluctance to receive his father's affection is all the more telling as Mark Herris's perceives them as the volatile moods of a young but cautious lover.
      The central scenes between David Suchet and Ben Silverstone are grippingly intense. Suchet's ruthless charm and quickly activated temper and deceit, contrast with slender Silverstone's vulnerable son, like a young deer only on the early wobbling slopes of independence. But Suchet is not his father but the tiger poised to kill.
      Each of these two characters has another foil to reveal their characters. Ben Anthony, as the son, lives with a young actress Carol Penn, whose sympethic affection but ingenuous admiration for the famous tycoon who she discovers is her partner's father is neatly portrayed. Similarly, the long serving Sven Johnson played by David Yelland contrives to seem an honest and even perceptive man amidst a world of deceit and betrayal. Even the weakness implicit in this relationship is well suggested by Yelland, who is entirely at home both in his subservience and in the determined way he tries to protect his life-boat as the Antonescu ship founders.
      The contrast between the ruthless but about to be unsuccessful tycoon, Gregor Antonescu, is superbly achieved by the apparent subtleties of his weaker, but about to survive, rival Mark Herris. He too, has a Polonius at hand, in the shape of his dogged junior lawyer David Beeston, who Will Huggins characterises perfectly with his burning sense of frustrated righteousness. Right in his case will be not might.
      The brief but beautifully elegant performance of Countess Antonescu, another one looking to find a raft amidst the wreckage, completes the company and the compelling theatre.
      Rattigan's play which deals both with recurring personal conflicts and public evil deserves such a cast, and in Maria Aitken's production has got it.
Roderick Swanston