Cast spot on in play revival

Joe Eyre as Kit, Florence Roberts as Diana and Ziggy Heath as Alan in French Without Tears

French without Tears

Oldham Coliseum, to Saturday
IT'S quite rare to see a production in which everyone seems almost perfectly cast, but that is what director Paul Miller has achieved with this highly regarded touring revival of the 25-year-old Terence Rattigan's first big hit, a play little revived in the past 30 years.

In later years the playwright would create masterpieces such as The Deep Blue Sea, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, delineating as he went a sad, lonely class of English character apparently out of sync with the world.

But here the writer hadn't yet found that voice and instead offers a sweetly anarchic, youthful romcom that charted the differences between the sexes as well as those between the Brits and the continentals.

A group of middle-class Brits hoping - and sometimes not hoping - to join the diplomatic service is encamped at the French resort in which Msr Maingot (David Whitworth) runs a cramming French school to help them pass the service exams.

There's Alan (Ziggy Heath), son of a diplomat and not keen to do as his father wishes but to become a writer, and Kit (Joe Eyre), who is in love, he thinks, with fellow resident Diana (Florence Roberts) - though Maingot's daughter Jacqueline (Beatriz Romilly) is secretly in love with him.

Meanwhile, Diana is also the target of newcomer Commander Rogers (Tim Delap), while Brian (Alex Large) has a thing for the French girls, and Diana's young brother and fellow student Kenneth (Alistair Toovey) is worried about... his linguistic failings.

But language and nationality don't have a lot to do with Rattigan's play, which is really about relationships. Forced into any mixed surroundings, he suggests, women will wrap men round their little finger and men will club together in a vain attempt to save face and credibility. Diana plays Kit and Rogers off against each other while secretly trying to make Alan, the true object of her affection, jealous.

French Without Tears is a curious work: funny at times, bordering on a typical farce.

But in place of big jokes and physical comedy (though it has both) we get more of the depth we expect of later Rattigan. There are one-liners, sure, but what the production has, courtesy of fine direction and that excellent cast, is a reality you wouldn't much find elsewhere.