What R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End says about the First World War, Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path tries to say about the Second, as a fine new production at Oxford Playhouse this week demonstrates.

Rattigan’s purpose is to present the task in hand – the necessary destruction of the enemy – as one in which all classes joined.

Other nations, too, as is shown in the case of Polish Flying Officer Count Skriczevinsky (William Reay, comically mangling his English) whose involvement in the campaign supplies an important thread to the plot.

His relationship with a breezily working class missus (Claire Andreadis), a former barmaid, is especially instructive on matters of social nuance, at which Rattigan always excelled.

Flare Path differs from Journey’s end, which was written some years after the conflict, in being a report direct from the heart of the war, its outcome still unclear in 1942, presented by RAF officer Rattigan with all his experience of the grim realities of the times.

His experience, too, of the world of showbiz glamour, through which the matinee idol Peter Kyle (Lyden Edwards) has been strutting his stuff on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now 41, and worryingly past his prime, Kyle is in Lincolnshire to try to rekindle romance with a young actress Patricia Warren (Hedydd Dylan), one year married to Teddy (Daniel Fraser), a cheerily insouciant young bomber pilot.

Home fire burns forestage in the close-by-the-base hotel – prop. the glumly efficient Mrs Oakes (Audrey Palmer) - wherein is observed the love triangle. This is not an equilateral one, since Teddy knows nothing of his wife’s past antics.

Not a great thinker, one can see, Teddy is possibly unaware, too, of the paternal – nay, maternal – interest of his doting Squadron Leader ‘Gloria’ Swanson (Graham Seed, maybe just a soupçon camper than he needs to be).

Anyway, all this is managed in excellent dialogue, splendidly delivered under director Justin Audibert, and especially so in the moving scene in which Teddy reveals the true feelings of the Bomber Boys, more than half of whom died on their perilous (and unfairly criticised) missions.

Rattigan’s gift as a wordsmith falters only once in what I thought of as ‘the Pat and Pete scene’.

“Oh Pete,” says Pat. “Come with me Pat,” says Pete. “We’ll forget all about Teddy. “I’m desperate, Pat,” Pete continues. “No Pete,” says Pat. Then comes the summons for the unlikely six-drinks-poured-a-minute waiter, the alliteratively named Percy (Charlie G. Hawkins).

P – lease!

Flare Path continues till Saturday. Highly recommended.

4/5