The rush of streaming during the pandemic is highlighting one entirely predictable trend: the solo outing. No worries about actors having to honor social distancing. Since this is theater, the worries can revolve more immediately and pertinently around psychological distancing.
This week’s perfect nugget of a presentation features top-flight British actress Janie Dee delivering Terence Rattigan’s not-quite-30-minute monologue, All On Her Own, as directed by Alastair Knights. Dee is Rosemary Hodge, just returned as the wee small hours encroach from a party where she heard another widow say she makes a habit of talking to her late husband at the hour of his death.
When Rosemary enters her stylishly appointed living room or den (All On Her Own was filmed at the Flemings Mayfair Hotel on London’s Half Moon Street), she immediately asks her absent husband Gregory what time he died so she can engage him in conversation. Confront him might be a more accurate phrase.
Hoping he will answer her perhaps through her own voice, she quizzes him about his demise, which has been declared an accident developing after Gregory took an abundance of pills (possibly Wellbutrin?) to chase too much booze.
Through the discourse that follows and as Rosemary puts away a good portion of a whiskey decanter herself, she tries to get Gregory to divulge his possibly suicidal last hours. Sometimes she thinks she has gotten through to him. Mostly, she only hears herself sputter and spew.
The burden of her recriminations are recollections of a marriage throughout which she sees herself as having been “unfailingly polite,” a posture she now views as insufficient, as stingy. Among other problems she caused between Gregory and herself was an insistence on referring to him as an architect when he was, as he saw it, only a builder and proud to be. Not posh enough for her crowd, though. Did she make him think he, born in Newcastle and not in London’s hoity-toity Hampstead, married above his station?
Realizing only after Gregory is gone how much she loved and relied on him, Rosemary becomes increasingly angry at herself. What she delivers as she pours the whiskey is an outpouring of guilt from a woman drinking alone. At the self-implication in those 27 minutes or so, Dee—wearing an unfailingly polite white silk blouse, black trousers and black pumps—impeccably travels the gamut of emotions from A to Zed. Knights’ camera keeps up with her usually from some feet away but sometimes in tight close-up so that the muscles in Rosemary’s neck are caught tensed and her mouth taut.
Speaking of anger raises the question of Terence Rattigan (1911-77) and his place in 20th-century British drama. Rattigan was certainly among the foremost playwrights up until 1956 when John Osborne unleashed Look Back in Anger, shaking up the traditional well-made, incorrectly considered unfailingly polite English drama. As a nasty result, dramatic babies like Rattigan’s were thrown out with the metaphorical bath water.
The development looked wasteful at the time, but, as these things go, a Rattigan reconsideration was inevitable. After all, works like The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version are too strong to languish in drawers for too long—that is, until they’re once again thought dated and so on into the recalibrating future.
Now All On Her Own is brought back. (Kenneth Branagh included it, as played by Zoë Wanamaker, in a recent West End season.) As the one-hander unfolds, it’s increasingly clear that Rattigan dealt in anger every bit as blistering as Osborne’s. For further evidence, it’s also worth looking at The Deep Blue Sea, into which the playwright lobs an angry young man some meaningful months before Osborne got his furious engines revving.
So here, thanks to Dee, Knights and crew, is a renewed chance to see and hear Rattigan at his concentrated best.
All on Her Own was streamed starting February 16, 2021 and will remain online through February 21. Information and reservations: allonherown.com
