On Wednesday last week I went to the National Theatre to see Man and Boy, written in the early 1960s by our distinguished alumnus Sir Terence Rattigan, whose typewriter still resides in the College archive. Ben Daniels gives a commanding performance as Gregor Antonescu, a ruthless and crooked tycoon in 1930s New York who is willing even to pimp out his own son in an attempt to save his empire from collapse.

Rattigan came up to Trinity to read history in October 1930 and lived on Staircase 6. His biographer, Geoffrey Wansell, says that the flamboyant Terry found Trinity delightful, although he looked down on many of his fellow undergraduates as immature. He did little work initially. Instead he directed his attention to OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He joined at once. Many of his contemporaries were to become friends and colleagues for life. In the end he was predicted a First but did not sit his Finals. This was partly to defy his father, who wished him to join the diplomatic service, and partly because he saw a realistic prospect of becoming a full-time playwright.

And so he did, although his reputation has swung dramatically over the years. Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, writes that he was “the golden boy of British theatre from the mid-30s to the mid-50s, with hit after hit meeting with increasing critical respect”. But he then had a “sudden, vertiginous and devastating” fall from fashion with the rise of gritty kitchen sink dramas by the likes of John Osborne, who was actually an admirer. Critics such as Kenneth Tynan dismissed him as “a by-word for theatrical conservatism, emotional sterility and artistic insincerity”.

Wansell writes that Man and Boy was “the play that [Rattigan] hoped and prayed would win back his reputation, and become the masterpiece he had always dreamed of writing”. He hoped that his friend Rex Harrison would take the lead role, but the actor was unwilling to play such a monstrous character. To Rattigan’s great disappointment, critics were unimpressed, and The Times dismissed it as “dime fiction”.

The current production has had a more positive reception, with critics noting its relevance in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein saga and the fall of similar disgraced figures. Rebellato argues that Rattigan’s reputation has risen more generally in recent years for several reasons: we now see the kitchen sink revolution in greater context; people are less inclined to dismiss plays they have not seen simply because of fashion; the period settings have receded in importance; what looks like emotional restraint is often an effective deployment of subtext; and his treatment of sex and homosexuality is more subtle than once thought, with “a queer sensibility running through these plays that speaks to everyone who has ever struggled in love”.

There have certainly been a number of good Rattigan productions in recent years. I also enjoyed The Deep Blue Sea with the late Helen McCrory and After the Dance with Benedict Cumberbatch. Like them, Man and Boy hardly qualifies as a cheerful night out, but it seemed to me a worthy addition to that list.