Saturday, September 21, 2013


Anyone who thinks that helicopter parents and headline-seeking paparazzi are phenomena unique to the late-twentieth or the early-twenty-first centuries should go and see The Winslow Boy, a play by the English playwright Terence Rattigan which is being revived at the Roundabout Theatre. A kind of drawing-room legal drama set in the years immediately before the First World War, The Winslow Boy tells what happens when a thirteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College at Osborne is accused – wrongly, the boy maintains – of stealing a five-shilling postal order. His upper-middle-class family believe him, although his sister, a suffragette, may do so out of reflexive cynicism about the authorities, and his father, a recently-retired banker, seems almost more concerned with his family’s honor than with his son’s feelings. He resolves to hire the sharpest legal knife in England to defend his son and demand the government retract its accusation: a resolve that proves costly indeed. The family lose their privacy as reporters harass them by telephone and lie in wait outside the front door; the father’s health is broken; the expense of pursuing the case eats up a substantial portion of his life savings; his elder son must drop out of Oxford because there is no money for tuition; and his daughter’s fiancé, dismayed by the loss of her dowry and by the notoriety the case has brought on the family, backs out of their engagement.

Read the whole thing here: http://amandavaill.com/Blog/Entries/2...