Flare Path

A flare path (as I learned while watching the play) was the line of lights that illuminated a runway to enable WWII Bomber Command pilots to take off and land - dark before and after, and perilously visible to enemy night fighters as well. Terence Rattigan knew a thing or two about flare paths: he was a tail gunner in RAF Coastal Command, and wrote the play during service (and put a tail gunner in it). Indeed, the manuscript was nearly lost when his aircraft was damaged in combat. In Flare Path the play, we see RAF officers and their crews staying with their wives in a hotel in Lincolnshire, close to their airbase. For all the  jovial banter and stiff upper lip, they know they could be called out at any moment without notice, to be sent on missions from which they may not return. Dramatic action comes from a love triangle involving actress Patricia, her old flame fading film star Peter Kyle and her husband Teddy, whom she married recently without passion, apparently despairing of making a proper go of it with married Kyle and seeking respectability. Teddy does not know about her previous relationship, and telling him is simply unthinkable.  (Teddy later confesses he suffers, as any sane person would one might think, from 'funk' while flying a plane and being shot at). Patricia is torn between her loyalty to pilot husband and her romantic attraction to Kyle, a dilemma resolved in perhaps a rather predictable way, given that the play was performed in 1942 (the fact that Kyle is a naturalised American and thus a non-combatant is a sort of lingering hint). Other plots weave across this one, including a marriage between a barmaid and a Polish count, who insists on her being addressed as 'Countess'. Count Skriczevinsky speaks hardly any English, source of much good-natured mirth. Does he love Doris as a wartime pleasure, or for ever? Doris isn't sure. Before, during, and after the men are called on a night mission, a goodly amount of pink gin is consumed. Comedy leavens the deadly serious central subject.

This production by the Original Theatre Company brought out the play's strengths to great effect. Rattigan had a genius for exploring the depths of emotion swirling away beneath English reserve, and an apparent belief in the victory of traditional decency over personal gratification. He had a sympathy for those who cannot live up to ideals their culture sets for them which still touches the heartstrings today. He was also a great craftsman, and Flare Path moves irresistibly through exposition and development to two climactic moments. One of these is based on reading a letter. Rattigan liked the dramatic power of documents. One thinks of Crocker-Harris reading the inscription to his book in The Browning Version, the newspaper report that crowns The Winslow Boy, and the rather different one in Separate Tables. Less conducive to modern tastes is the sentimentality. The final scenes just seem too soft, but to a wartime audience who of course did not know how things would end, there must have been fairly strict boundaries to what was palatable: Rattigan had difficulties even getting the play put on because theatre managers felt the public did not want a piece about war. Then there is the  patronising habit of making working class characters figures of fun (and shrewish Maudie, with her endless prattle about bus timetables, is hardly even fun today). No point being too stern about this: after all Shakespeare had his rustic clowns to give us a break from the verse of the nobles. The idea that only the educated few have complex interior lives has a long ancestry. Back to the show, there was terrific ensemble acting throughout, and no point really in picking out individual names.


The performance was compelling and finally very moving, partly because it turned one's mind to the historical realities. I'm sure my Battle of Britain veteran grandfather would have approved, and I'm glad his grandson knows a bit more now about the life that crews and officers endured. Although in many ways a period piece, Flare Path - when given a production as strong as this one - still does a vital job of bringing its fast-receding period to life. Presumably theatres in 1942 would not have had the sound and lighting effects that we enjoyed at Theatre Royal Winchester. But then they would not have needed much help in imagining them. The play ends with a wartime song, 'I don't want to join the airforce'. I suppose in its original London run, the audience, stirred but not shaken, would have joined in.