“There’s no situation in the world that can’t be passed off with small talk,” claims hostess extraordinaire Olivia Brown in Terence Rattigan’s Less Than Kind. It’s a maxim that could well serve as Rattigan’s theatrical epitaph, the philosophy that allows him to smuggle desperation, frustration and steel-capped social critique in amongst the silk peignoirs and smoking jackets of his drama. In celebration of the centenary of this newly fashionable playwright’s birth, the London stage is to be crowded with his work.

A pall of ennui hangs over the 1930s drawing room of the National’s latest Rattigan revival, as deadly as the boredom its burnt-out party people all dread. The trouble is, I’m not sure to what extent the playwright intended it.To write about the etiolated and the unfocused, the lost souls of the inter-war years, needs energy and clarity.