While The Sun Shines, Theatre Royal, Bath, review: 'Delectably droll'

Little attention has been paid to Terence Rattigan's While The Sun Shines, the 1943 wartime comedy that, during his lifetime, was his longest West End hit

Rob Heaps in While The Sun Shines (Tristram Kenton)

As the 2011 centenary celebrations of his birth abundantly attested, Terence Rattigan is back in fashion for keeps. But the programme to this new production rightly remarks that there's an anomaly in the playwright's posthumous career. Rarities have been unearthed; newly-commissioned drama (eg Rattigan's Nijinsky and Kenny Morgan) has pondered the connection between the author's life and work; and the greatest of his plays, such as The Deep Blue Sea, have become staples of the repertoire. Strange, then, that so little attention has been paid to While The Sun Shines, the 1943 wartime comedy that, during his lifetime, was his longest (1,154 performances) West End hit.

The middle-classes wrestling with their repressed emotions? Ambivalence about the value of the stiff upper lip? Christopher Luscombe's buoyant, attractively cast revival demonstrates that this featherweight farce of romantic crossed-wires tackles none of these recurring Rattigan themes. It could be seen as a carefree companion piece to the poignant Flare Path (1942), Rattigan's other Second World War play which for, a time, ran alongside it in Shaftesbury Avenue. Luscombe has expertly trimmed the material down to a two-act structure and his production show a lovely lightness of touch in conveying how this escapist froth catering for a war-weary audience also signals, in its depiction of aristocratic buffoonery, the coming of a new social order.

The proceedings unfold over 24 hours in the Albany “chambers” of Bobby, the young Earl of Harpenden. It's the eve of his wedding and the show kicks off with a tease when, naked but for a bed-cover, a strapping American officer, Joe Mulvaney, emerges from the bedroom. All innocent, of course. Joe had been rescued by Bobby after getting blotto in a nightclub. Good Anglo-American relations go awry, though, when Joe mistakes the inexperienced Lady Elizabeth, the Earl's real fiancee, for Mabel, the floozy friend he's offered to set him up with. Throw in a Free French lieutenant who has fallen passionately in love with Elizabeth during a 10 hour rail journey from Inverness and you have the makings of a diplomatic incident.

Rob Heaps exudes dimwitted boyish charm as the Earl who complains that it's “class prejudice” that has prevented him from being promoted beyond an ordinary seaman. Tamla Kari, with her winning warmth, deftly humanises the “tart with a heart” cliche as Mabel. Even as it is misting over, her eye remains firmly on the ball – and you love for her for it. She's the harbinger of the upwardly mobile future and the stage-manager of the dynastic alliance. The charm of the piece partly derives from the way it uses its potty little imbroglio to illustrate massive social changes – the “doomed” nature of the aristocracy, say, from Michael Cochrane's hilariously splenetic Duke whom the lure of a reckless gambling game infallibly turns to putty. And it's delectably droll to watch the whole chaotic sexual license of wartime exemplified by these rather tidily choreographed shenanigans. Romantic rivals who share a chaste bed, the stereotypes Allies are played with engaging panache by Heaps, Rupert Young and Nicholas Bishop as the French lieutenant who gets a huge laugh when he declares, at the denouement that, once again, England has muddled through.

To 30 July; 01225 448844