In Praise of Love, originally entitled After Lydia, is the first part of a 1973 double-bill play by the English playwright Terence Rattigan. It was the penultimate play he wrote. The play's action was loosely inspired by the true-life relationship between the actor Rex Harrison and his actress wifeKay Kendall. In the play, the couple are transformed into the egotistical left-wing literary critic Sebastian and his East European refugee wife Lydia. During the Second World War, some 30 years previously, Sebastian had served in military intelligence while the part-Jewish Lydia was with the Resistance and then survived on her wits and her feminine charms; each is shown using the aptitude for deception developed then to try to protect the other from the knowledge that Lydia is suffering from a terminal illness. Rounding out the cast are Mark, a best-selling popular novelist and a friend of Sebastian's, who has long carried a torch for Lydia, and Joey, the couple's 20-year-old son, himself an aspiring writer, who is in rebellion against his father's overbearing manner and professed Marxist views. The plays were described by Rattigan's biographer Michael Darlow in the following terms:
Original productions
The original London production, at the Duchess Theatre, was directed by John Dexter, and starred Donald Sinden as Sebastian and Joan Greenwood as Lydia. It ran for 131 performances, and was described by The Sunday Times critic as " “the most piercing exposition of love under great stress that I have ever seen on the stage.”
The subsequent New York production, directed by Fred Coe, which dropped the much-panned 2nd-act play Before Dawn, starred Rex Harrison in the role based on himself and Julie Harris as Lydia. Rattigan was said to be "intensely disappointed and frustrated" by Harrison's performance, as "Harrison refused to play the outwardly boorish parts of the character and instead played him as charming throughout, signalling to the audience from the start that he knew the truth about Lydia's illness." Critics however were quite pleased with the performance and, although it did not have a long run, it was yet another of Harrison's well plotted naturalistic performances.
