Love In Idleness, Apollo Theatre, London

In 1944 Terence Rattigan rewrote his then unperformed play less Than Kind, and created a more commercial alternative, now named Love In Idleness.  In doing so he is said to have removed much of the first version's political message.  Trevor Nunn has looked at both, and created a synthesised script which retains the second title, but brings back some of the lost meaning.

Widow Olivia Brown is living with a member of the War Cabinet, John Fletcher, a Canadian businessman brought in to oversee tank production.  She has taken enthusiastically to the high society life, and revels in consorting with senior politicians, novelists and other members of the perceived elite.  But then she is told that her seventeen year old son Michael is returning from evacuation to Canada and wonders how to explain to him her new domestic arrangements.

Part love story, part family drama, the plot hinges around the antipathy between the stridently left wing Michael and the devoutly capitalist John, and the conflict of loyalties it creates.  At the beginning of each we see contemporary pathe news showing the liberation of France, and the Beveridge proposals for a post war system of universal welfare, the ending of the present and a vision for the future.  Not one that Fletcher has much time for.

But there's little by way of political acuity about the script, and the potential for a conflict of ideas is lost in comic stereotyping.  It's enjoyable enough entertainment for the first three scenes, but in the last, where Olivia has been forced to make her choice between the men in her life, it descends into farce with predictable punchlines and a lame, supposedly feelgood, ending.  You leave feeling short changed.

The saving grace is Eve Best's glowing performance as Olivia.  Exuberant, loving, stylish, flirtatious, conflicted, she is always convincing and very much the centre of attraction.  Anthony Head does a decent job as Fletcher, managing to lend some humanity to the arrogance of power.  Edward Bluemel's Michael is hard to take seriously, his intellect overly swamped by teenage petulance.  Too much Harry Enfield's Kevin, not enough Jimmy Porter.

Overall an amusing enough experience, but without any of the bite  that the programme notes might lead you to expect.