ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Q: Why did you select Man and Boy for Roundabout audiences?

A: The plays of Terence Rattigan have always been favorites of mine. I’ve been very interested in showing our audience one of his lesser-known dramas. We did a beautiful revival of The Deep Blue Sea in 1998, and Roundabout also produced his plays The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy in the early 1980s, before my time here. I’ve read and seen so much of Rattigan’s work, but I only got to know Man and Boy fairly recently. It struck me right away as the perfect choice. Somehow, this play from 1963 seems incredibly prescient – there are events in the story that could have been taken straight from the headlines any day in the past few years, and I think our audience will find that relevance both surprising and exciting. But even more importantly, this play has what I love so much about Rattigan’s writing: he writes well-made plays with characters who possess wonderfully deep emotional lives. It’s what sets him apart from his contemporaries. Winston Churchill actually once called Rattigan “a master of understatement,” and I couldn’t agree more. There’s a meaningful quiet in these plays, and I love how different that makes them from some of the classics we’ve revived lately. And with Frank Langella’s extraordinary talent to lend a deft hand to the lead character, it became clear that this was the right moment to embark on this production. Our audience has been seeing Shaw, Coward, and Wilde – all writers known for their dazzling wit and love of wordplay. To me, it’s exciting to venture over to the other end of the spectrum, where the dialogue is more sparing but no less beautiful in its own very different way.

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