Flare Path at the OLT: More Fizzle Than Flare
Photo: Maria Vartanova
War dwarfs personal relationships. Set against the sense of duty to country, an extra-marital affair seems “tiny and rather cheap,” says the woman at the centre of the love triangle in Terrence Rattigan’s Flare Path. This is particularly so when her husband is a serving RAF officer, risking his life on every bombing mission, and her lover is an aging matinee idol.
Rattigan wrote the 1942 drama while he was an air gunner, flying Coastal Command during the Second World War. Thus, stiff-upper-lip dialogue that makes light of the constant danger, through jolly, matter-of-fact conversations and silly nicknames for the flyers rings true. So does the sense of dread hanging over the women who are left behind. One drinks and pretends not to worry. A second is irritable and withdrawn. The third struggles with her moral dilemma between passion and duty, trying to decide whether her husband or her lover has the greater need of her.
The emotional restraint of most of the characters in Flare Path, reflected in the understatements in the text, can and should heighten the emotional connection and anguish with the threat of death always at hand.
Sadly, the insipid Ottawa Little Theatre production does not do this. Instead, as directed by Klaas van Weringh, the emotion is so suppressed that the result is frequently awkwardness as two characters preserve their distance from each other and keep their voices level. The latter may be partly an attempt to maintain the appropriate accents, but much of the time it seems to be at the director’s behest.