Review: The Winslow Boy (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Being a 22 year old in London earning a graduate salary doesn’t give much opportunity to bag the top seats at all the amazing new productions happening daily – Peter and Alice, The Audience and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, to name but a few.

Then I found out about the Old Vic’s very convenient under-25 tickets. For a fraction of the price of a normal ticket, I snagged two front row seats to see Lindsay Posner’s production of Terence Rattigan’s 1946 play, The Winslow Boy.

And that was all I knew of it. I’d read no reviews, hadn’t got a beaten up copy of the play from my school days and, dare I say it, had never seen another Rattigan play to compare it to. For the young person’s price, I thought, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it turned out to be awful. Far better than forking out eighty pounds for a stalls seat at The Book of Mormon (no cheap tickets for that, I can assure you) only to decide it was an over-hyped piece of rubbish. (It probably isn’t, by the way – this is just my bitterness at not having been able to get a ticket.)

The Winslow Boy turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable (I genuinely felt guilty for enjoying it so much, knowing full well that the chuckling grey-haired man next to me had probably paid five times as much as me for his seat). Based on the true story of a teenage naval officer accused of stealing a five shilling postal order and his father’s fight to clear his name, the play is about everything but, it seems, the Winslow boy himself.

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Charlie Rowe and Henry Goodman as the eponymous Winslow Boy and his loyal father
(Photo Credit: The Telegraph)

Set in the Edwardian era, the Winslow case provides the perfect plot device for Rattigan to explore pressing contemporary issues such as the cause for woman’s suffrage, the impending First World War (and the naive excitement of young men eager to enlist) and the battle between what is morally right and what is socially accepted.

Between the assured laughter at Arthur Winslow’s cutting ripostes, delivered like clockwork, and the rapt attention at the first act’s denouement, an enthralling cross examination of Ronnie Winslow by the tough, brilliant lawyer hired to defend him, Sir Robert Morton, the audience was invested so fully into the play by the time the curtain went down for the interval that there was no question of Rattigan being deemed unfashionable, as he has apparently been called over the last few decades.

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Peter Sullivan delivers an epic performance as the coolly brilliant Sir Robert Morton
(Photo Credit: officiallondontheatre.co.uk)

Henry Goodman, who I last saw in the West End as Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, delivered a moving performance as the stern, but emotional father, Arthur Winslow, whose health visibly deteriorates as his fight continues – the fight that he believes in so strongly, even as the boy who it is all about, Ronnie, shrugs it off with teenage nonchalance, snoozing as his father reads the press reports aloud, pain etched convincingly into his every expression.

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The Winslow Boy having a siesta
(Photo Credit: wearewaterloo.co.uk)

Another notably stellar performance was given by Naomi Frederick as the Winslow Girl, Ronnie’s sister, trussed up in elaborate gowns, rebellious (still single in her late twenties – gasp!), intelligent and passionately idealistic. She works for free, campaigning for suffrage, forgoes her engagement for the sake of the case, and declares herself uninterested in whether her stammering brother has actually stolen the postal order or not – she cares only about justice.

George Bernard Shaw made one of his many astute observations when he noted that “A man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger one.” In this respect, the Winslow Girl represents the heart and reasoning of all young people coming to terms with the unfairness of the adult world – and one can only hope to still possess all the heart and thirst for justice evident in her much older father’s character, once we are past the age of idealism.

The play reminded me of another play I saw in London’s West End, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (also a 1961 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine). That production starred Elisabeth Moss and Keira Knightley at the Comedy Theatre, and featured the two woman (Knightley pouting, as always) as teachers falsely outed as lesbians by a schoolgirl. The lie ends in tragedy, and we are shown how a child’s folly can destroy the lives of people she barely knows.

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Moss and Knightley in The Children’s Hour
(Photo Credit: TimeOut)

Yet the difference with The Winslow Boy is that whether Ronnie Winslow did in fact steal his petty postal note is entirely irrelevant. We never really know whether he did or not, and, interestingly, we never really care. We never see the infamous courtroom scenes or the stampede of journalists outside the front door. Every humorous interchange, every frosty argument, every tender moment is played out in Posner’s flowery, green, harmless Edwardian living room – until we realise that everything that happens offstage, and Ronnie’s over-discussed postal note, is irrelevant. It is the changes in the family, representative of the changes in British society, that we have really come to see.