1942–43 Broadway production

Flare Path had a short run on Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 at Henry Miller's Theatre from December 1942 to January 1943. Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness

Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE was an English actor. He was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. He later won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai...

 played Teddy and Nancy Kelly

Nancy Kelly

Nancy Kelly was an American actress, who was a movie leading lady in the 1930s, making 36 movies between 1926 and 1977, including portraying Tyrone Power's love interest in the classic Jesse James , which also featured Henry Fonda, and playing opposite Spencer Tracy in Stanley and Livingstone...

 played Patricia. The play was Guinness's Broadway debut, and he was granted leave from the Royal Navy in order to take the role. The director was Margaret Webster

Margaret Webster

Margaret Webster was an American-born theater actress, producer and director. Through her parents, she held dual US/UK citizenship.-Career:...

.
Lighting effects were used to simulate the flare path in a scene where the planes take off from the airfield beyond the hotel.

Flare Path was not as successful in America as it was in Britain. Marion Radcliff of The Billboard wrote that although she found Rattigan's depiction of the RAF in wartime to be authentic, "it is unfortunate that he had to pivot the main action of his play about a very uninspired triangle situation – a triangle whose individual angles seem at times very obtuse."

Broadway 1942–43 Cast:

2011 London revival

In 2011, Trevor Nunn

Trevor Nunn

Sir Trevor Robert Nunn, CBE is an English theatre, film and television director. Nunn has been the Artistic Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. He has directed musicals and dramas for the stage, as well as opera...

 directed a West End

West End theatre

West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...

 revival of Flare Path at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket as part of the playwright Terence Rattigan

Terence Rattigan

Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE was one of England's most popular 20th-century dramatists. His plays are generally set in an upper-middle-class background...

's centenary year celebrations. It marked Nunn's debut as Artistic Director of the theatre. The play opened on 4 March 2011. It recouped after six weeks and was extended an extra week due to popular demand, closing 11 June 2011.

Sienna Miller

Sienna Miller

Sienna Rose Diana Miller is a British-American actress, model, and fashion designer, best known for her roles in Layer Cake, Alfie, Factory Girl, The Edge of Love and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In 2007, the London Film Criticsnamed her British Actress of the Year for Interview...

 starred as Patricia, Harry Hadden-Paton

Harry Hadden-Paton

-Stage:He was commended in the 2007 Ian Charleson Awards for his appearances in Romeo and Juliet at the Battersea Arts Centre and in The Importance of Being Earnest for the Peter Hall Company at Bath. He appeared in the 2010 premiere of Posh at the Royal Court...

 played her husband Teddy, James Purefoy

James Purefoy

James Brian Mark Purefoy is an English actor best known for portraying Mark Antony in the HBO series Rome.-Early life and work:...

 played Teddy's rival Peter, and Sheridan Smith

Sheridan Smith

Sheridan Smith is an English actress and singer who is best known for her contributions to the British sitcoms Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Gavin & Stacey and Benidorm. She has also become a recognised face in West End theatre, where she has appeared in Little Shop of Horrors,...

 co-starred as Doris. The hotel set was designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis. The airfield beyond the hotel where the planes take off was depicted with projections designed by Jack James, supplemented by sound effects by Paul Groothuis

Paul Groothuis

Paul Groothuis is an award-winning sound designer who has had a long and prolific career on the London stage. Groothuis was born in Holland and moved to the UK in 1979 to study Stage Management at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He joined the National Theatre on the South Bank in 1984 and...

 and lighting by Paul Pyant

Paul Pyant

Paul Pyant is a British lighting designer, whose designs have been featured in the West End, on Broadway and in opera houses around the world.-Life and career:...

.

The revival of Flare Path was well received by a number of critics. Paul Taylor of The Independent called it a "richly entertaining and beautifully judged revival of this theatrical rarity." According to Charles Spencer of The Telegraph, "Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path (1942), rarely ranked in the top drawer of his plays, emerges in Trevor Nunn’s superb production as a three-handkerchief weepie that somehow manages to be both profoundly moving and wonderfully funny." Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "...Trevor Nunn uses Rattigan's insightful characterizations to create a multilayered view of war and what it does to people." Michael Billington of The Guardian said it was "... a tribute to the collective spirit of wartime bomber crews and their partners. Given the circumstances, you'd hardly expect a debate about the morality of the air offensive: what the play provides, with Rattigan's characteristic flair for understatement, is a deeply moving portrait of people at war."

Henry Hitchings of the London Evening Standard noted that the play might seem dated, but said "...there's no mistaking Rattigan's talent for depicting repressed emotion and tragicomic acts of concealment. Crucially, as in most of his writing, there is a gulf between what the characters say and the true feelings they are either unable or unwilling to express." Billington wrote, "...it is precisely that embarrassed English emotional hesitancy that makes this play so overwhelmingly moving." Sam Marlowe of The Arts Desk called it "...a shattering ensemble work, in which every detail glows with truth, compassion and humanity, and where every seemingly ordinary second of life in an existence hemmed in by the ever-present threat of death is charged with a quiet intensity."

Paul Callan of The Express offered a dissenting view, finding fault with the slow pace and describing the characters as stereotypes that "sadly combine to show the age-lines on this play, even if it is a well-crafted example of Rattigan’s skilled writing."

London 2011 Cast: