A Bequest to the Nation

I turned on the radio at random and caught the last half-hour of what seemed to be a play about Lady Emma Hamilton. As it was a few minutes past the hour I thought I'd missed only the first few lines of a two-hander in which a drunken Emma confides her history to a tactfully non-judgmental servant in her final days, so one can imagine my surprise when a lonely and apparently delusional Emma attempted to summon her Nelson... and after some delay he actually arrived!

It gradually became evident that this was in fact a fully-cast play set on the eve of Trafalgar, examining Nelson's and Emma's relationship with a sympathetic and unromanticised eye: two touchy and desperately insecure people, both past masters of the art of emotional posture and manipulation and yet both sincerely devoted to a liaison that was deeply wounding to Nelson's wife and aroused cruel mockery in the onlooker. I assumed it was a recently commissioned production, and was astonished to learn from the credits at the end of the transmission that "Bequest to the Nation" had been written by the great Terence Rattigan: a play of his that I had never even heard of, despite the recent stage revival of many of his works.

That certainly accounts for the humanity and understanding in it...