Terence Rattigan's "Less Than Kind" playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London is a delight.

On our drive home, my partner and I chatted over how much we'd enjoyed the play and the acting, but agreed that there seemed to be something at variance with Rattigan's craftsmanship and the energy that the character, Michael, back home from Canada, had had to put into NOT appearing to be quite the awful young prig that his lines suggested.

We felt there was something missing, and that this might have been due to the passing of time.   Had the play been performed when it was written in 1944 audiences would have quickly recognised Michael as being someone under the spell of Moral Re-Armament, a worldwide organisation - but one that at the end of the war was to come under a very dark cloud.  People were remembering that its founder, Frank Buchman, had had dealings with the Nazis and Himmler, and, in the New York World-Telegram on August 26th 1936 had thanked God "for a man like Hitler".

Following the suggestion in the programme notes that the character of Sir John Fletcher was based on the influential Canadian, Lord Beaverbrook, I looked up MRA on the web and made an interesting connection.  It seems that there had been a scandal in Canada with regard to the tough methods involved in collecting money going to support what was seen as an inappropriate life style for the leaders of MRA.

Once, on theatre tour in Scotland, I heard from a group of ladies who had set up a hostel to care for sick miners in Stirlingshire, that Moral Rearmament had closed its doors to them in a most cruel manner because they suspected them of being lesbians.  From what I read, MRA put up a front of implacable homophobia to hide from the world Buchman's own homosexuality - an example of hypocrisy that might have added energy to Rattigan knocking the corners off Michael's 'superiority'. And, I suggest, would also have added authenticity to the character without straining the credulity of the audience of the time.