Terrence Rattigan’s 1940s play Flare Path is a love story set against the backdrop of a town near an RAF airbase during the Second World War. Actress Patricia Warren is married to a dashing and confident young bomber pilot, Teddy Graham, but is still in love with an old flame, the famous actor Peter Kyle, with whom she has rekindled an affair after bumping into him some time into her marriage. Peter turns up at the hotel at which Patricia and her husband are staying near the airbase to try to convince her to leave Teddy and escape with him. Much of the play is taken up with Patricia’s struggle to decide whether she should stay with Teddy out of duty or go with Peter for love.
The themes of honour versus passion are prevalent throughout Flare Path. In some ways, these themes make the play seem a bit mawkish to a modern audience – we’re not necessarily rooting for the wife to stay with her husband, to do her duty for her family and country, in the way a patriotic wartime or post-war audience might have been. Perhaps the struggle would have felt more realistic if there had been a bit more chemistry between Patricia and either her husband or her lover, but this didn’t come across particularly strongly in this production.
However, there is much to enjoy about Flare Path. The dialogue is quick and witty and peppered with RAF slang, which is a lot of fun to decode (and sometimes impossible to totally understand). Claire Andreadis is marvellously memorable as the Countess, Doris Skriczevinsky, her performance moving the audience to laughter and tears with equal ease. Mrs Oakes’s hotel living room is a perfect setting for all the action with very little need for props. Light and sound effects are put to extremely effective use to convey the movements of aircraft to and from the nearby airfield; these background murmurs never allow the audience to forget (even in the lighter moments of the play) that war is always going on outside the comforts of the play’s onstage action.
If you want to see a warm-hearted wartime drama this week, do pop down to the Oxford Playhouse and see Flare Path. ★★★☆☆ @BookingAround 3rd February 2016
Photo Jack Ladenburg
