Rattigan’s return

The career of Sir Terence Rattigan is a story in three acts. At the height of his career, in the 1940s and early 1950s, he was one of the best-known playwrights in Britain. Then from the mid-1950s, when the “Angry Young Men” came to dominate British theatre, writers like Rattigan and Noel Coward started to be seen as absurdly posh, out-of-date figures with their upper-class dramas. Then, in the late 20^th century, came Rattigan’s revival. Once again, he was seen as one of the great modern British playwrights. His plays returned to the West End and the National Theatre, were filmed and appeared regularly with all-star casts on the BBC.

How do we account for these curious changes? What made Rattigan, once so famous, seem out-of-date, even irrelevant, and then in a few decades, become more relevant than writers like Osborne, Wesker and Orton, who had once cast him into outer darkness?

Sir Terence Rattigan had a conventional upper-class background. He was part of the generation of Noel Coward, Ralph Richardson, Gielgud and Olivier. He was born in 1911 and hence a product of the post-World War I era. His grandfather was Sir William Henry Rattigan, a notable India-based jurist, and later a Liberal Unionist MP. His father was Frank Rattigan CMG, a British diplomat. He was educated at Sandroyd School, a prep school in Surrey, Harrow, and Trinity College, Oxford.

In 1935 Rattigan and Gielgud adapted A Tale of Two Cities but it was called off. His first acclaimed play was French Without Tears (1936), which starred Trevor Howard and Rex Harrison, and ran for more than 1000 performances in the West End. It was filmed in 1939.

Rattigan had a good war, serving in the RAF from 1940-45. His experiences inspired Flare Path (1942), about a love triangle between a pilot, his actress wife and a famous film star. It ran for 670 performances and was followed a year later by While the Sun Shines (1943), set in a set of rooms at Albany, an exclusive apartment complex in Piccadilly. A wealthy Earl is about to marry his fiancée, but two other suitors appear and complications ensue. The play ran for more than 1100 performances. It was filmed in 1947.

Then came Rattigan’s golden years. In 1946 The Winslow Boy was produced, his first major play, with Emlyn Williams as the barrister Sir Robert Morton. It tells the story of a father’s fight to clear his son’s name after the boy is expelled from naval college for stealing a postal order. It ran for nearly 500 performances. In 1948 The Winslow Boy was filmed by Anthony Asquith, one of the best-known British film directors of the time, with Robert Donat, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Margaret Leighton.

In 1948 came another famous play, The Browning Version, with Eric Portman as Crock, an elderly public school Classics master, who is about to retire, facing a sad old age with his unfaithful wife. It was filmed, again by Anthony Asquith, in 1951, with Michael Redgrave as Crock, and later appeared on the BBC with Ian Holm and Judi Dench. A second cinema version was made with Albert Finney in the main role in 1994.

The Deep Blue Sea opened in 1952 and ran for more than 500 performances. Again, it had an all-star cast, including Peggy Ashcroft and Kenneth More. It tells the story of Rattigan’s most famous heroine, Hester Collyer, who has failed in a suicide attempt. She has left her husband, Sir Willam Collyer, a High Court judge, for a semi-alcoholic former RAF pilot, Freddie Page. It was filmed in 1955, with Vivien Leigh and More again.

In 1952 Rattigan received his first Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for The Sound Barrier, with Ralph Richardson, directed this time by David Lean. In 1954 came his last huge theatrical success, Separate Tables, which ran for more than 700 performances in the West End and more than 300 on Broadway. It is made up of two one-act plays, both involving middle-aged men caught up in scandals, and came only a year after his friend (and possibly lover) John Gielgud had been arrested for “cottaging”.

Rattigan’s plays and films have several things in common. They all featured some of the best-known British actors of the time and the films were made by celebrated British directors. Many were set in posh places – apartments in Albany, grand hotels on the South coast, public schools. They often involved scandals and affairs. In no time at all, they felt like products of a bygone age, a world away from CND marches, pop music, the New Left, the new world of satire, of TW3 and Beyond the Fringe. Rattigan seemed a fossil — all these retired majors, barristers and public school masters.

Already in 1954, Kenneth Tynan, the great champion of The Angry Young Men, wrote of Rattigan in The Observer, “the inhabitants belong to a social class derived from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success…” Then came a theatrical revolution. Rattigan summed  it up perfectly in an interview in 1977: “There I was in 1956, a reasonably successful playwright with Separate Tables just opened, and suddenly the whole Royal Court thing exploded, and Coward and Priestley and I were all dismissed, sacked by the critics.” That was the year Rattigan died. Although he was knighted in 1971, his reputation as one of Britain’s great mid-20^th century playwrights never recovered in his lifetime. He had one last theatrical success, Ross (1960), the story of TE Lawrence, played by Alec Guinness, which ran for more than 700 performances. He wrote a couple of screenplays about the super-rich, The VIPs (1963), with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), with Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau; both films are forgotten today. His knighthood offers another clue to his decline after the 1950s.  He was the fourth playwright to be knighted in the 20^th century, after Sir W. S. Gilbert in 1907, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero in 1909 and Sir Noël Coward in 1970 — each one posher than the one before.

In the 1990s everything changed again. Rattigan was rediscovered by a new generation of actors, directors and filmmakers. In 1993 The Deep Blue Sea  was directed at The Almeida by Karel Reisz (it was filmed by the BBC in 1994) and in the West End by Peter Hall. All his most famous plays were revived and filmed. David Mamet wrote the screenplay for a new film of The Winslow Boy (1999), Terence Davies directed a new film of The Deep Blue Sea with Rachel Weisz (2011), there were productions of Rattigan plays on BBC Radio and TV, and numerous stage revivals at the most prestigious theatres: The Chichester Festival, The Old Vic, The National, and the best known actors of our time have queued up to play Rattigan’s most famous characters, from Kenneth Branagh and Helen McCrory to Joseph Fiennes, Dominic Cumberbatch and Janet McTeer.

In an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2011, Rattigan’s centenary year, Dominic Cavendish wrote: “Few playwrights in the 20^th century were dismissed as cruelly from the warm hearthside of critical approval as Rattigan was in the wake of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.”

What explains this comeback? First, Rattigan has been rediscovered as a great writer about women. It is no coincidence that the part of Hester Collyer — glamorous but suicidal — has attracted so many leading actresses over the past thirty years. This is perhaps connected with his homosexuality and interest in scandal as a subject, not just adultery but the sexual ambiguity of some of his greatest characters. Writing in the 1940s and early 1950s he couldn’t write openly about homosexual affairs, but now this subject has become more not less relevant. Indeed, the great gay playwrights of the mid-20^th century – Coward, Rattigan, Tennessee Williams – seem to create more complex and interesting characters than the blustering heterosexual males of the Angry Young Men, like John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter.

“Terence Rattigan’, wrote Philip Hensher in The Guardian, also in 2011, “was the great playwright of restraint, which means, of course, that he was obsessed with the prospect of passion breaking out. There is no more fervent champion of sexual obsession than the puritan, and no more convincing exponent of the destructive power of passionate emotion than the poet of repression. Rattigan’s great subjects are what may not be spoken about; what may be concealed; and the moments when people – particularly English people – find it impossible to say what they feel.”

Strip away the poshness of the upper-class world of the 1940s and ‘50s, and what speaks to audiences today is a world of sexual inhibition, repression and varieties of love that dare not speak its name, whether homosexuality or adulterous love. In a recent revival of In Praise of Love at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Rattigan’s favourite pattern, the triangle, takes centre-stage. It seems to be a play about a loveless marriage between a pompous left-wing newspaper critic and his wife, an Estonian refugee. But what is the relationship between them and a successful male American writer? Who does he love? It seems to be the wife, but might it be the husband? This isn’t about class. It’s about different kinds of sexual passion that can’t be expressed. This is why Rattigan suddenly seems so relevant again and why his plays about the homosexual scandal about Gielgud and the hidden sexuality of TE Lawrence suddenly seem so contemporary.

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