After only sixty performances however, the play closed. It was briefly revived at The Croydon Theatre in 1940 but was then left unperformed for more than fifty years. Always hyper-sensitive to criticism and fearful of failure, Rattigan omitted it from his Collected Plays, and in a rare interview in 1976 at the end of his life, dismissed it as “rather heavy” and “turgid”. It was not until 1992 that the play was given a proper revival. A terrific television production with Anton Rodgers, Gemma Jones, John Bird and Imogen Stubbs received excellent reviews; and in 2002 the Oxford Playhouse finally mounted a professional stage production. Michael Billington, in The Guardian, hailed the play as a lost masterpiece, concluding that he was “utterly convinced that this is one of Rattigan’s finest studies of the English vice of emotional repression.”

The initial failure of After the Dance is not hard to explain. It was, quite simply, the wrong play for its time. A world on the edge of war was not interested in the goings-on of the self-indulgent Mayfair Set of the play. Perhaps too, the original audience was uncomfortable with such a morally ambiguous play. Just where did Rattigan’s sympathies lie? Were they with the ageing partygoers or with the earnest younger generation? The answer, surely, is neither. The Scott-Fowler set is both appalling and endearing; Peter and Helen both admirable and priggish. Perhaps the most sympathetic character in the play is also the most contemptible – the slothful layabout, John. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the British public should prefer the more straightforwardly uplifting plays that Rattigan produced immediately afterwards – Flare Path and While the Sun Shines.

The recent revivals of After the Dance show that the play is fully worthy to stand alongside such favorites as The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version. It is remarkable to see how prescient Rattigan was in this play. It was, after all, written before war had broken out; but Rattigan clearly realised that war was inevitable. By the end of the play, Cyril has been called up and Moya is holding a gas mask party. Who knows what might happen to the other characters? Maybe Peter is wounded at Dunkirk, while Helen is dropped into occupied France to work for the Resistance. The reason one thinks in these terms is that Rattigan had a genius for creating characters so real that they live on in the memory as much more than just characters from a play. After the Dance is a work of great emotional tension and reality. It is also extremely funny. Perhaps soon, The National Theatre will give it the major production it so surely deserves.
Francis Lloyd