Wicked tale of sexual deception

Terence Rattigan's forgotten drama of high financial swindles and low moral dives is restored to theatrical life in a blaze of vitality, after forty years mouldering in oblivion.

Man And Boy sank beneath waves of apathy and bemusement at its 1963 premiere. David Suchet's enthralling portrayal of evil in action, as Romanian financier and oil king, Gregor Antonescu, who loves power and manipulation more than human beings, helps us to realise that Rattigan wrote no more shocking or provocative drama than this.

In Man And Boy, despite contradictions of character, Rattigan manages things he did nowhere else: he turns political and writes off global capitalism as the mortally sick patient in the intensive care ward.

Then he brings wickedness on stage with Suchet's saturnine Antonescu, by turns seductive and terrifying, and seeks to embarrass his audience by showing that wickedness in action. The plan is worked to rivetting effect in Maria Aitken's edgy production.

The Thirties scene, in a Greenwich village apartment, which designer Simon Higlett makes a shabby monument to bohemia and slender means, looks conventional Rattigan, although in an alien, Yankee milieu. Ben Silverstone's frightfully English pianist Basil and his American actress girlfriend, Carol, are scarcely out of bed when the past catches up on them.

It comes in the form of Basil's father Antonescu, whose business empire faces collapse. When he arrives, preceded by David Yelland in nice, comic form as the financier's dour, dead-pan, all-purpose fixer, we expect a typically Rattigan, father and son clash of values.

How will Silverstone's socialist Basil, all love-hate for his neglectful, financially incorrect daddy, react to the hounded Gregor: Suchet subtly brings the oil king to life with a faint, European accent, surface charm and a calm that quite belies his heart of darkness.

The father-son relationship is not, though, the main issue and it remains hard to get the complicated hang of why the pair have fallen out entirely. It is the play's portrayal of destructive power relations that matters.

Rattigan stages the strangest, most dramatic of seduction scenes in service of this theme. Gregor uses the apartment to hold a meeting about a merger with Mark Herris, the homosexual president of American Electric.

Like some diabolical magician, he plans to persuade Mark into a deal by passing himself off as secretly gay, with Basil as his lover. The scene in which Gregor supervises the sexing-up and dressing of his unknowing son and shows him off before Colin Stinton's appreciative president cuts to the dark heart of the matter.