Occasionally there's a renewed effort to move Terrence Rattigan up to the level of his contemporary pre-"Angry Young Men" playwrights like Noel Coward and the poetic Christopher Fry, if only because his very literate, traditional plays were enormously popular, leading to his knighthood. But only a few still seem to work: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables, and maybe The Deep Blue Sea.
After the Dance never has been successful; and even the Shaw Festival's masterful ensemble, great designers, and authoritative director Christopher Newton can't make it worth the trouble.
We meet the Scott-Fowler household hung over after a party: David, a rich, debauched author; John, his parasitical but supportive friend who drinks even more than David; Peter, his virginal adopted son whom David is grooming for some unclear success; and Joan, his wife and drinking partner. Various hangers-on arrive including Helen, Peter's fiancee, who outspokenly attempts to stop David from drinking himself to death. Helen is a kind of mouthpiece for the playwright, describing the partying "lost generation" as people damaged by World War I and therefore attempting to dance away reality while destroying themselves. The idea is not exactly startlingly perceptive, and it gets talked to death.
Meanwhile, Helen turns out to be the "salvation" of all this decadence: she's in love with David, out to get him to divorce his wife and marry her, and about as annoying a character as I can remember seeing onstage recently. Of course, wife Joan is truly in love with David but plays along with his notions against true love, so when he falls in love with Helen's "true love" and plans to divorce and remarry, Joan laughs bravely, parties, and jumps off their balcony.
Eventually, David is made to realize that he is bad for Helen (and himself), so he arranges to have the innocent, discarded Peter sent off to take up again with Helen as the woman he deserves. And I guess he does.
I saw the always-vivid Claire Jullien substituting as the most prominent bitchy friend, Julia, and Jullien makes more of Julia than is written. With superb non-verbal skills, Deborah Hay -- as the unhappy wife Joan who adopts the surface charm and good humor expected of her -- breaks down really affectingly after David brightly tells her that he is divorcing her and walks happily off.
Fortunately, the two most interesting characters have the climactic situation-resolving scene together; and Patrick Gallagan (David) and Neil Barclay (John) play it with magnetic energy.
The symbolic appearances of non-speaking young couples dancing in David's crowded sitting room interested me only because After the Dance opened at the Shaw Festival on the night after A Little Night Music opened with its smaller stage similarly crowded by "The Liebeslieders" who dance in and out of the action. In that Sondheim work, however, those interruptions are distracting where I was not hoping for distraction.
