A Bequest to the Nation
30 May 2015 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI 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...
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...
