The National Theatre’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy treats a lesser-seen play like a polished but uneasy mirror: sumptuous on the surface, corrosive underneath. Anthony Lau’s production mines the drama for both period detail and contemporary bite, so that Rattigan’s study of power, inheritance and moral compromise feels urgent rather than merely historical.
At the centre is Ben Daniels as Gregor Antonescu, a performance that commands attention. Daniels combines a glacial charm with sudden, predatory force—one moment disarmingly convivial, the next quietly ruthless. He keeps the audience off balance, revealing a man who performs civility as a form of control. Opposite him, Laurie Kynaston’s Vassily supplies combustible youth and moral friction: their clash—generational, ideological and painfully personal—drives the play’s momentum.
Lau’s staging is visually rich without becoming decorative. An Art Deco-inflected design—velvet drapes, tailored suits and warm, vintage lighting—evokes the era while doubling as a comment on vanity and social capital. Furniture and light shift fluidly, carving overlapping spaces onstage so that several emotional worlds can exist at once within the same room. The choreography of movement matters here: props cross and characters circle one another, making interpersonal transactions feel like a ballet of ambition. Those physical choices sharpen the play’s darker moments, turning domestic interiors into arenas of negotiation and concealment.
The production foregrounds small cruelties and private coercions. Moments of black humour puncture the mounting claustrophobia; at other times, exposition stalls the drama’s momentum. Secondary characters sometimes read as types rather than fully rounded people, which dulls a few of the play’s subtler revelations. Still, when the family conflict returns to center stage the emotional stakes snap back into focus—especially through Daniels’s gradual unravelling, which is consistently compelling.
Musically and visually the piece sustains tension without smothering intimacy. Lighting and costume design successfully evoke period textures while inviting present-day associations: reputation and appearance function as forms of currency, and the set’s gloss suggests both seduction and confinement. A few theatrical flourishes—projected cast lists that feel like marquee announcements or cinematic touches—occasionally distract from the play’s quieter power, but they don’t derail the
What makes this revival feel timely is its insistence that moral compromise is not a relic. By treating Rattigan’s text as a lens on contemporary anxieties—financial manipulation, institutional secrecy, the leverage of patriarchal power—the production reframes the story as a small-scale tragedy with large social reverberations. You leave thinking about ambition not just as a private pursuit but as a social force with collateral damage.
For theatre-makers, the production offers a working model: preserve period detail but be willing to emphasize movement, spatial dynamics and moral clarity. Such an approach can help older plays speak plainly to present-day audiences without flattening their complexities. For programmers, the revival suggests that audiences will respond to hybrids that balance emotional intimacy with a measure of spectacle—shows that can travel from an intimate house to a larger stage with minimal loss of impact.
Minor unevenness aside, this Man and Boy revives a neglected text with intelligence and force. The evening’s driving engine is performance—Daniels’s mesmerizing centrepiece—supported by sharp design and a director’s clear interpretive spine. If anything, the production proves that reframing a classic can illuminate both the play’s original craft and the anxieties of our own moment.
Takeaway: a stylish, sometimes unsettling revival that reclaims Rattigan for an audience tuned to power, compromise and moral consequence—and a useful blueprint for how to make mid-century repertoire feel freshly relevant.