Summer 1954 brings together Table Number Seven and The Browning Version for an evening of Terence Rattigan at Chichester Festival Theatre from January 21-25, starring Nathaniel Parker and Siân Phillips, directed by James Dacre.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspaper. It's really
00:06lovely this afternoon to speak to Matt Parker, who's put down his mince pies long enough
00:10to chat about...
00:11It wasn't easy, I have to say!
00:15...to chat about Summer 1954, which is coming to Chichester Festival Theatre from the 21st
00:21to 25th of January, and it sounds such an enticing, appealing combination. It's two
00:27one-act plays, it's Table Number 7 and The Browning Version, and the two haven't been
00:32done together before, you were saying. Why are they together now, and why does it work
00:37to put these two together, do you think?
00:40Well, they're put together because the Rattigan Estate said that we could have a choice, and
00:46it's quite rare that there'll be this encouraging and this open, but they said that we could
00:51have a choice of what we try and combine here and see if we wanted to jazz it up a little.
00:56Table Number 7 is actually two one-act plays from separate tables, it's called, so we're
01:03doing the second half there, which, when it was made into a film, had David Niven winning
01:08an Oscar for it, which was rather exciting. And the second one, which has also been made
01:12into films, is The Browning Version, and there was famously Albert Finney, but also Michael
01:17Redgrave making amazing movies of those. I don't think either of them won Oscars for
01:21them, but they're brilliant parts and brilliant plays. I think what's interesting about doing
01:26them both together is that they're both tales of sadness, hidden trauma, and lives that
01:40aren't well-led, that they've gone down paths they shouldn't have gone down. You know, everyone
01:48leaves their own path, so it's the path they went down, but there's something happening
01:52within the run of each of these plays, and they're done in real time, where if that beginning
01:58of that 45 minutes or one hour went slightly differently, the play would be completely
02:01different. And you would never discover, for instance, in The Browning Version, that the
02:05master Andrew Crocker Harris has so much going on in his heart, in his head. As he says at
02:12one point, I may have been a brilliant classical scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the
02:18facts of life. Okay, that leads you somewhere. You know, the story of their marriage in the
02:27second one is a tale of tragedy, but I think in both of them, Rattigan gives you a little
02:38glimmer of light at the end of each tunnel, which is a relief, because they're not easy
02:44plays to watch if you're there for an evening's entertainment. It's so interesting, so specific
02:50summer 1954, yet we're not talking period. It's because these plays are clearly going to speak
02:56to us now, aren't they? Yeah, that's right, they're 70 years old, and they are incredibly relevant.
03:01Each one of them, the first one, which is about a faux major, who I can't really tell you what
03:07happens, because it just gives the game away, but it's set in a Bournemouth hotel,
03:14just off the promenade, 1954, and something gets revealed, and the lady of the house, as it were,
03:21she's still a paying guest there, which is Sian Phillips, playing Mrs Railton Bell, leads this
03:26charge against my character. But, well, you've got to see it. There's a dissipation there, which is
03:36heartbreakingly beautiful. And then there's the second play, which, once the interval happens,
03:46seven of us, who are in the second play, jump out of those first costumes, jump into the new
03:51costumes, and try and get your head in gear, and be somebody completely different, not a pretend
03:56major from 1954 in Bournemouth, but actually a schoolmaster in a Middle England boarding school.
04:01Well, I was going to say, fantastic gymnastics for you. How do you do that, Lee,
04:06to just cast a student, for example?
04:08I couldn't do it if I'm in a dressing room by myself, because I teach a warm-up, I sing and
04:15dance, I do all sorts of weird things in my dressing room, but once I need to get into the
04:19part, I am rattling through those lines. And I do it for both characters, both plays, every night,
04:26roughly the similar sort of thing, if not exactly the same, where I rattle through them, and I
04:31say them, and I say them as fast as I can to myself in the mirror, and it just hones me down.
04:36And I learned this lesson when I was doing Inspector Lindley, many years ago, and Sophia
04:41Canedo was in it, and she was playing a minister from the government whose daughter had been
04:47kidnapped. And she's a wonderful woman, a wonderful actress, and she'd be joking, laughing
04:53with us, and then I noticed about a minute before they even said, okay, get ready to do a take,
04:58she'd just go, rather like the lights in Mastermind, and she would just concentrate on it.
05:08That's why she's so good. And so I have to get myself in gear, you know, I learned from all
05:16these people I've ever worked with, and this is one of the tricks I've learned from Sophie,
05:19I just get myself in gear, and I have to be Andrew Crocker Harris by the time I step out of
05:25that dressing room. Fantastic. We're looking forward very much indeed to seeing it. Oh, well good.
05:30Summer 1954, January the 21st to the 25th. With Sian Phillips as well. Absolutely. Great to talk to you, thank you. Thank you.