'When seen in 1950 Emlyn Williams’s semi-autobiographical play must have been dynamite. Today it is no less gripping': QUENTIN LETTS first night review of Accolade

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: 22:39 EST, 17 November 2014 | Updated: 05:07 EST, 18 November 2014

When a controversial novelist is caught in a sex scandal, who is to blame? Is it the writer himself, who unwittingly seduced a 14-year-old girl? 

Is it her father who seems likely to blackmail the writer?

Or is the real guilty party the British public who gaily encouraged the writer’s risque novels, never expecting that he might actually live the life his tales depicted?

Emlyn Williams’s semi-autobiographical Accolade was first seen in 1950 and may seem daring for that era.

Trenting is both avant-garde and Establishment. How delicious! He is married to the beautiful, accepting Rona (Abigail Cruttenden) yet still gets his kicks with East End tarts

Accolade at The St James Theatre By Emlyn Williams. . This cracking production, directed by Blanche McIntyre, stars Alexander Hanson as Nobel prize-winning novelist Will Trenting.

Here is a play which refers to naked cavortings in a dingy pub room in Rotherhithe. Our caricature of that era is of dowagers reaching for smelling salts at the thought of an orgy.

But maybe the Lord Chamberlain (who censored plays) let this one through because it is so balanced as it considers principles of artistic morality. This cracking production, directed by Blanche McIntyre, stars Alexander Hanson as Nobel prize-winning novelist Will Trenting. 

The play begins with him being given a knighthood.

Trenting is both avant-garde and Establishment. How delicious! He is married to the beautiful, accepting Rona (Abigail Cruttenden) yet still gets his kicks with East End tarts.

Trenting is both avant-garde and Establishment. How delicious! He is married to the beautiful, accepting Rona (Abigail Cruttenden) yet still gets his kicks with East End tarts

Trenting is both avant-garde and Establishment. How delicious! He is married to the beautiful, accepting Rona (Abigail Cruttenden) yet still gets his kicks with East End tarts

He congratulates himself on his liberalism, his knowledge of ‘the real world’. The masses, alas, are less tolerant of him when they discover how he has been behaving.

There is some solid acting here: Daniel Crossley as Trenting’s valet, Jay Villiers as his stuffshirt publisher, Claire Cox as a society friend, Olivia Darnley and Jay Taylor as Trenting’s orgy chums from the wrong side of the tracks. Bruce Alexander (police chief Mullett in TV’s Frost) plays the seedy ‘blackmailer’, Daker.

Trenting’s teenage son (Sam Clemmett) is arguably the real victim of the play, his innocence shattered by his father’s misbehaviour.

Today’s audiences will face competing demands on their prejudices: any initial inclination to license this top novelist’s immorality may yield to awareness of the effects of licentiousness.

Any kneejerk damnation of the Press for reporting scandal may yield to an admission that sexual abandonment, particularly in the elite, has a price.

When seen in 1950 this must have been dynamite. Today, with so much public talk about posh people’s privacy, it is no less gripping.