There is a balcony on stage and a most elegant piano on the side. Everything you need to picture the 1939 wealthy London society. The scene is set in a house owned by thirty-something David Scott-Fowler, a rich historian, and his wife Joan. They have been married for twelve years, building their union on the secure groundings of companionship rather than love. Many characters revolve around this luxurious drawing-room: John who lives as a parasite off David’s money and bar , Peter a young and promising Oxford graduate who is helping David with his project for a book, and Helen, Peter’s fiancée, a young and square-minded girl.
The first scene introduces Peter and John, the latter obviously recovering from one of the many drinking nights in society, and Peter earnestly working on David’s improbable book. Later, Joan (Rachel Dedman) enters the play as a sophisticated socialite, a veil of melancholy colouring her faint smile. Helen and her brother George (Will Todman) join us, and the girl shows all the devastating energy of the manipulative young woman she will soon turn to be.
In this alluring society characters drink their way to oblivion, in a earnest attempt to forget the world around them. Peter (Christopher Hayes) and Helen (Bess Roche) seem to be the only two young beings who still live with illusions and simple dreams of happiness, but is it all as it seems?
Little by little Terence Rattingan’s drama depicts a society of the time: it is all about painfully suppressing the emotions of oneself. Rachel Dedman’s acting as Joan is of high quality as she subtly shows the emotions of a woman entertaining her guests while carrying the heavy shadow of her repressed feelings. Avoiding facing discomforting feelings is exactly what David Scott-Fowler does: he is the epitome of this society as well as the centre of the whole play, trampling on his friends and family for the sake of getting what he wants, whisking away whatever is in his way, a difficult role to undertake for any young actor and Max Gill makes the best of it.
As Joan expresses it, in the elegant tone which is very much obligatory: ‘When you know something is going to happen, it makes it seem further off to joke about’. It is in the fashion of this society to have what she describes as a ‘quiet little divorce’. In this big race towards disaster, the wave of reality will soon come hitting the setting of their lives.
The cast of After the Dance plays the terribly glamorous card game very well, but a question remains: is there a winner? As director Joe Stenson finely implies, there is much more in the unspoken silence than in the witty words of the characters. The fast and colourful dance music fades out, all we are left with is the empty set, where everything seems so stylishly dead. Where is the love, we stand naively asking?
2nd and 3rd March, 7:30 pm, St John’s College Auditorium
