Based on the real story of Alma Rattenbury, who in 1935 was acquitted of murdering her husband, thirty years her senior, and George her eighteen year old lover, who was found guilty. The dramatic center of the piece rests on the contrast established between Alma and Edith Davenport (a wholly fictional character)- a repressed woman of late Victorian social and sexual values who is the foreman of the jury and whose own son, the same age as George, leaves her for a life of (in her view) debauchery with her estranged husband and the lad's father. Perhaps the strongest irony is that Alma is condemned by the public more for seducing a youngster than for initiating if not carrying out the brutal murder of her husband. |
Other Terence Rattigan plays performed by RSC are:
Harlequinade (2010)
The Deep Blue Sea (1994)
The Winslow Boy (1983)
The Browning Version (1976)