BIOGRAPHY
This biography has been provided by Terence Rattigan's biographer, Michael Darlow • Profile • Chronology
Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London in the Kensington home of his widowed paternal grandmother in the early hours of the morning of Saturday 10th June 1911 (His Birth Certificate records the date as 9th June. But there is evidence suggesting that this is incorrect). He came from a distinguished family of lawyers, diplomats and imperial administrators of Irish descent. Nothing in his background would have led an outsider to anticipate that he would become a successful playwright. His paternal grandfather, Sir William Rattigan, had been Chief Justice of the Punjab and on his retirement been elected Member of Parliament for North East Lanarkshire.
At the time of his birth his father, Frank Rattigan, was a 32 year old diplomat with a seemingly glittering career ahead of him. He was 2nd Secretary at the British Legation in Tangier, Morocco, a country at the centre of rising international tensions between France and Germany. Rattigan was born a few days before the coronation of King George V and Rattigan’s father was in London to play a minor ceremonial role in the coronation and escort an important Moroccan dignitary to meetings in The Foreign Office. Like her husband, Rattigan’s mother Vera, a spirited former Edwardian beauty, came from a family of distinguished Irish lawyers. Terence was their second son. Their first, Brian, born three years earlier, was born with a deformity in one of his legs and, however, unfairly, from the time of Terence’s birth both his father and mother invested most of their own hopes and frustrations in him.
During the first two years of his life the baby Rattigan was allowed to accompany his parents on their overseas postings, but from the age of two onwards he spent growing amounts of time separated from them, left in the care of his formidable widowed paternal grandmother, Lady Rattigan. His interest in the theatre was almost certainly first aroused, when he was six, during the First World War. With his parents again away, serving in the British Legation in Roumania, Terence was again living with his grandmother in Kensington. An indulgent, recently widowed (her husband had been killed on the Western Front) aunt, Barbara, who before her marriage had been a Gaiety Girl who danced and sang in a string of glamorous London musicals, began taking young Terence to the theatre. As he recalled thirty years later, taken to see Cinderella he was instantly hooked: “I implicitly believed in everything I saw on that stage.” He soon became an inveterate theatre-goer, ceaselessly pestering his relations to take him to more and more plays and, once he was old enough to go on his own, spending all his pocket money on theatre tickets. Sent away to his first boarding school shortly before his ninth birthday, Terence’s passion for the theatre in no way abated. Cast in a school play, his class work fell off so badly that his worried headmaster gave him a choice – either he gave up the part in the play or he received a beating. Young Rattigan chose the beating!
In 1922, when he was eleven, Rattigan’s life was suddenly turned upside down. His father’s glittering career as a diplomat was suddenly brought to a humiliating end. Following a dispute with his boss, The Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, over the handling of a now forgotten Balkan crisis, Frank Rattigan was effectively forced into early retirement on a small pension. His previously absent father now became all-too-present, a frequent embarrassment to him amongst his school friends because of his ostentatiously old-fashioned Blimpish attitudes and penchant for turning up at school with a series of empty-headed fluffy blondes. The drop in the family’s income meant that for the rest of his schooldays Rattigan would never be as well off as his friends and at the same time served to heighten the already considerable tensions in his parents’ marriage caused by Frank Rattigan’s on-going series of barely concealed affaires. The result was mounting pressure on their sons as each of parent sought to find compensation in their sons for their own disappointment and frustration.
In 1925, shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Rattigan entered his father’s old school, Harrow. He was only able to enter such an elite and expensive school because he had won a scholarship, relieving his father of paying a substantial part of the hefty school fees. Now, as well as visiting the theatre whenever he could, he started reading every play he could lay his hands on – he read every singe play in the Harrow School library. He had also started writing plays of his own. One, written when he was 15, has survived among his papers. A domestic melodrama, Integer Vitae or The Pure in Heart, involves a murder and centres around the parents of a boy who use their life savings to send him to an expensive school in the hope that he will be able to earn enough money when he grows up to keep them in their old age. He also wrote short stories and articles for the school magazine. One article, which appeared in 1929, dealt with modern drama and “The ceaseless conflict being waged in drama today, ‘Entertainment versus Instruction’.”
Rattigan had grown into a gentle, rather reserved, but popular boy. What he lacked in hardness and outward bravura he more than made up in wit and charm, and by his prowess at games of hand and eye co-ordination such as cricket. In his last two years at Harrow he regularly opened the batting for the first eleven and played in both the racquets and squash teams. Academically he won prizes for history and literature. At the same time he had also become something of a rebel, clandestinely passing round works by writers banned at the school such as Bertrand Russell and the Huxleys. In one particularly blatant act of defiance against the school authorities and what he and his friends saw as their unhealthy support for militarism and the horrors brought about by the First World War, he participated in protests aimed to bring an end to compulsory Officer Training Corps parades at the school.
In 1930, having won a minor scholarship which relieved his father of having to pay a substantial part of the university fees, Rattigan entered Trinity College, Oxford to read history. At Oxford his radical beliefs deepened further. Early in 1933, just after Hitler had come to power in Germany, he took part in the notorious Oxford University Union debate which passed the motion: “This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country.” He also continued writing plays and had short stories, theatre and film reviews published in university magazines. Rattigan would later attribute his eventual decision to reject the career in the diplomatic service mapped out for him by his father and instead embark on a career as a professional playwright to seeing a production during his first year at Oxford of Ibsen’s Ghosts starring Sybil Thorndike.
Rattigan became an enthusiastic participant in university theatrical life, making an early mark by his appearances in Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) ‘smokers’, (revues staged in the society’s club room), doing a series of routines in which he delivered a stream catty comments on people and events at the university while dressed as a female character he created called Lady Diana Coutigan. The major event of the OUDS 1931-2 season, and a turning point in Rattigan’s life, was a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by one rising young professional star who came down to Oxford specially for the occasion, John Gielgud, and starring two others, Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse. Rattigan won a tiny part as a musician who helps to discover Juliet’s body at the end of Act IV. Although Rattigan proved a disastrously bad actor, delivering his single line at what was meant to be a moment of high tragedy so badly that he produced a roar of laughter rather than tears, the production served to bring him into close contact with the circle of actors and theatre people around Gielgud.
Events during the production also provided the basis for the plot of a play which Rattigan wrote with a fellow undergraduate, Philip Heimann, in 1933. Called Embryo, the play centred on the lives of four university undergraduates during a university production of Antony and Cleopatra, in which two attractive professional actresses are brought in to play leading female roles. A love triangle develops when one of the actresses falls in love with one of the boys and finds herself competing with the boy’s closest friend for his affections. Retitled First Episode and in part funded by Rattigan out of a legacy he had recently received from an aunt, the play was produced for a one week run at a small experimental theatre near Kew Bridge, the Q, on 11th September 1933. Directed firmly for laughs, its more serious intentions toned down and with many of its more openly homosexual (‘gay’ was not a word used in this context at the period) elements cut, the play nevertheless provoked a small storm in the press. Critics found its depiction of contemporary undergraduate life, its casual sex, drinking and gambling, deeply disturbing. Uneven and in places not fully realised, First Episode nevertheless deals with themes and emotions which would recur throughout Rattigan’s later work – the clash between emotion and reason, the pain of unequal passion and the guilt and destruction that too often comes with overwhelming sexual desire. In its depiction, although heavily understated, of the relationship between the two central male characters the play was ahead of its time – homosexuality was still a taboo in the 1930s and homosexual acts, even between consenting males in private, attracted harsh goal sentences.
The controversy that surrounded the production of First Episode led, on 26th January 1934, to the play’s transfer to the Comedy Theatre in London’s West End. Further cut, rewritten and recast to tone down its serious intent still more and heighten its comedy, the play received generally favourable reviews and ran for more than two months. Owing to the contract Rattigan and Heimann had signed with the play’s producer they received almost no money from the play, but Rattigan nevertheless decided to leave Oxford immediately, without taking his degree, and move into a flat off London’s Piccadilly to embark on a career as a professional playwright. For a few short weeks he and Heimann lived a high life of wild parties, gambling and dreaming up ever more impractical schemes for new plays.
In the spring on 1934, when the play closed, Rattigan and Heimann woke up to find themselves flat broke and without income. Facing bitter reality, Heimann went back to South Africa to join his family’s business and Rattigan returned home to face his disappointed father. By leaving Oxford without a degree Rattigan had ruined his chances of becoming a diplomat. Fortunately his father took pity on him. He offered him an allowance of £200 a year for two years to allow him to stay at home and write, on the condition that, if at the end of that time he still could not support himself as writer, Rattigan would allow his father to direct into whatever safe job he could find him.
For the next two years Rattigan sat in a small upstairs room in his parents South Kensington home writing play after play. As each one was finished he parcelled it up and sent it off to one theatrical manager after another. And as each was rejected and returned he would parcel it up again and send it off to another manager. By the end of the two years he had written six plays but not one had been produced. In that time he had received a little money from working on a stage adaptation of a book by a popular novelist who was a contact of his father’s and from working with John Gielgud on the dialogue for a stage adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. However, neither had gone into production. With the two years now up, his father found him a job on a small salary at Warner Brothers Film Studios in Teddington writing additional dialogue for film scripts. Soulless though the work was, Rattigan later admitted that it did him good. It purged in him any lingering pretensions to fine writing: “There was no time for frills. The plot had to be told in three lines.” In later years the almost surgical economy of Rattigan’s dialogue was one of his greatest strengths as a dramatist.
In October 1936 his luck suddenly changed. One of his rejected plays was chosen by the London manager, Bronson Albery, as a cheap stopgap to occupy The Criterion Theatre on London’s Piccadilly Circus when the play Albery had running there unexpectedly failed. Renamed French Without Tears (the original title had been Gone Away), with a cast of young, virtual unknowns, the play chronicled the comic, sometimes painful, fallings-out of five young male English students at a residential language cramming establishment in France when a beautiful, man-hunting young woman, Diana, is introduced into their midst. Based on Rattigan’s own experience when sent by his father to similar establishments in France and Germany while he was at Oxford, the play was the lightest of comedies but with that essential underlying core of true feeling necessary if a comedy is to have lasting theatrical life.
French Without Tears opened to a rain-soaked and ill-tempered first night audience at The Criterion Theatre on 6th November 1936, a night when London’s critical and fashionable expectations were focused elsewhere – on two other far more prestigious West End openings, a new opera production at Covent Garden and the premiere of a much anticipated new Marlene Dietrich film. By the time it opened even the play’s backers were losing faith in it. Just hours before the first night curtain rose one backer sold his share in it for almost nothing and a famous actor who saw the final dress rehearsal advised the cast not to open: “It’s simply dreadful. Don’t open!” But after an uneasy first twenty minutes, the first performance quickly developed into a roaring, laughter and applause filled success. As the final curtain rattled down the audience rose to its feet calling “Author! Author!” An astonished Rattigan, who only moments before had been cowering in fear against the back wall of the theatre, was more or less thrown on to the stage to receive the audience’s cheers. The first night of French Without Tears would go down in theatrical history as one of the most successful and unexpected first nights ever. The next morning the newspaper reviews were glowing: “Brilliant little comedy”, “Full marks”, “Joyous Jest”. French Without Tears ran for over 1,000 performances in London, over 100 in New York and was turned into a successful film.
Rattigan suddenly had money and fame. After the stress of the previous two years he stopped writing and abandoned himself to a riotous round of
drinking, parties, gambling and casual affaires with a succession of attractive young men. When he did rediscover the urge to write he turned out a much more serious play about an idealistic young man just down from Oxford whose earnest young fiancéewho falls in love with a successful, but lazy and hard-drinking historian, and the historian’s wife who seems unable to tell her husband of the true depth of her love for him. Titled After The Dance, it dealt both with Rattigan’s own current pre-occupations and with topics and emotions dealt with in his earlier plays. While completing the play and waiting for it to go into production Rattiganworked with a fellow former Oxford undergraduate, pacifist and socialist, Tony Goldschmidt, on a farce satirising the rise of Hitler. Called Follow My Leader, it charted the rise, in a country called Moronia, of a plumber called Hans Zedesi, whose party’s slogan is “Up Zedesi” (“upsy daisy”). He comes to power by blowing up his country’s parliament building and blaming it on cowardly liberals, and sustains his power by organised “spontaneous” mass displays of devotion, chanting of “Up Zedesi” and by invading neighbouring countries. Completed in 1938 when Hitler was poised to march into Czechoslovakia, Rattigan and Goldschmidt wanted to rush the play into production immediately. But as the Munich crisis loomed the theatre censor, The Lord Chamberlain, on the advice of the Foreign Office, banned it for fear of offending Hitler. When it was finally allowed to be produced in 1940, after the war had begun, its moment had passed.
Meanwhile After The Dance made its protracted way into production, opening at London’s St James’s Theatre on 21st June 1939 with a strong cast. A new play by Rattigan was now an eagerly awaited event and the celebrity-packed first night went well with the audience rising to their feet at the end to call for the author. The reviews were almost uniformly good, the critics congratulating Rattigan on having the courage to follow his comedy success, French Without Tears, with a serious play. But outside events were against it. As the European crisis that would lead to World War Two deepened, audiences fell off and the play closed, after running just six weeks, on 12th August 1939. After The Dance became forgotten, effectively lost from the canon of Rattigan’s writing until produced on BBC Television in 1994 and published in a new edition, with a brilliant introduction by Dan Rebellato, by Nick Hern Books in 1995. In 2002, to mark the 25th anniversary of Rattigan’s death, it was revived by Oxford Playhouse in a production played by a young cast and directed by Dominic Dromgoole. As a result it is now widely recognised as one of Rattigan’s greatest plays.
When war was declared on 3rd September 1939 Rattigan, despite his earlier pacifism, rushed to enlist. To him, as to most of his friends, Hitler was clearly an aggressor and must be stopped. However, with government machinery not yet ready to take thousands of young men into the forces, Rattigan, like thousands of others, was rebuffed.
Faced with severe depression and writer’s block, he consulted a Svengali like psychiatrist called Dr Keith Newman. Newman prescribed enlisting in the armed services and seeing active service. So in the spring of 1940, after Hitler invaded Denmark, Rattigan applied to the R.A.F. and was accepted for training as an officer air gunner/radio operator. After initial training he was posted to R.A.F. Coastal Command and spent much of the war flying from bases in the north of Scotland and Northern Ireland on 12-18 hour long operational missions over the North Sea and Atlantic in Catalina and Sunderland flying boats. He proved a very popular and efficient officer. 
Rattigan’s depression and writer’s block was cured and late in 1941, during a protracted mission in a Sunderland flying to West Africa, during which they were grounded for repairs after being shot up by a German fighter, Rattigan began scribbling a new play into an exercise book. When complete he sent it back home to his parents with an urgent request to pass it on to his agent. Called Flare Path, the name given to the flares that lit a runway at night to help planes land in the dark, the play opened after a short provincial tour at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue on 13th August 1942. Set in the lounge of a hotel close to an R.A.F. bomber airfield, the plot follows the emotions and interactions of a group of airmen, their wives and loved ones during the night and following morning of a night bombing mission over Germany. A deft mixture of serious war play and comedy, Flare Path, like Rattigan’s other plays, deals with different kinds of love, unequal passion and characters inability to express the true depth of their feelings for each other. It also deals with fear, bravery and the emotional trauma of war in way that caught precisely the public mood of Britain in wartime.
Well received critically, the play was a popular success, running for 679 performances. Rattigan later re-worked much of the material into the script for the film The Way to the Stars. More plays followed. A comedy, While the Sun Shines, opened at The Globe Theatre (next door to The Apollo where Flare Path was still playing to packed houses) on Christmas Eve 1943. Set in the London apartment of a young aristocrat, Bobby Harpenden, conscripted into the wartime Royal Navy as an able seaman, the action takes place on the morning before his wedding to Elizabeth, the daughter of a duke. The story revolves around the efforts of two Allied officers, an American and a Frenchman, on leave in London, to make love to Elizabeth, plus the antics of various other friends and relations. It builds, through a series of steadily escalating and ever more hilarious complications and misunderstandings, until Elizabeth finally decides to settle for the “ordinary quiet restful love” of her fiancée Bobby rather than the glamour of the American or “white hot burning passion” of the Frenchman. The play was an immediate smash hit, running for more than 1,000 performances. The leading theatre critic of the day, James Agate, hailed it as a “delightful, a little masterpiece of tingling impertinence” and compared Rattigan’s writing to that of Oscar Wilde. Both Flare Path and While the Sun Shines later transferred to Broadway, but both were deemed too English and failed.
Another, more serious play, Less Than Kind, quickly followed. Modelled loosely on Hamlet, the plot concerns an idealistic, Labour-leaning eighteen year boy who, on his return from five years’ evacuation in Canada, is horrified to find his widowed mother, Olivia, living with a reactionary Tory MP and industrialist who he accuses of having made his fortune by selling armaments to both sides in the 1930s and believing that ‘liberty’ means the freedom to exploit other people. The play centres on the mother’s anguish as she is torn between her love for her son and for her lover. However, cast with the star husband and wife partnership of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the leading parts of the mother and the industrialist, during rehearsal it was drastically changed at their dictation so as to stand Rattigan’s original intention almost totally upon its head. Highlighting the comedy and downplaying the play’s more serious elements, Alfred Lunt, playing the Tory industrialist was transformed from villain into loveable, patriotic hero, while the boy, rather than coming out on top in his arguments with his mother’s reactionary lover, is made to look merely rude and stupid. By the time it opened in London on 20th December 1944 at the Lyric Theatre, next door but one to The Globe, where While the Sun Shines was still playing to packed houses, the changes had been so extensive that even the play’s title had had to be changed, from Less Than Kind to Love In Idleness. Where Rattigan’s original play had reflected the wartime upsurge of socialist idealism which in 1945 would put Clement Attlee’s Labour Government into power, the re-written Love In Idleness merely mocked the idealists amongst whom Rattigan had until then always counted himself.
The critics, unaware of how Rattigan’s original intentions had been perverted during rehearsal, thought little of the play and accused him making little out of dramatic possibilities of the plot. All, however, heaped praise on the performances of the Lunts. The play became a sell out hit and then transferred to Broadway, becoming a sell out success there as well. Throughout the war, as well as writing successful plays Rattigan did a lot of morale boosting film work. (A list of his film credits can be found in the Resources Section of this website)
The coming of peace and the Labour Party’s general election victory in the summer of 1945 found Rattigan embarked on a sexual relationship with the Tory MP and diarist, Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, and at work on a new play, The Winslow Boy. Based on the celebrated Archer Shee case of 1911, the year of Rattigan’s birth, the play concerns a 14 year old naval cadet arbitrarily expelled from Osborne Naval College for the alleged theft of a five shilling postal order and his father’s struggle to get his son a full judicial hearing. It charts not only that fight, but the emotional, physical and financial turmoil brought upon the whole family by the father’s unswerving determination to fight for justice for his son. Apart from changing the family’s name from Archer Shee to Winslow, the plot of Rattigan’s play largely remains true to the details of the original case on which it was based. Deliberately modelled on the style of Granville Barker, the play is in four acts set in a single set, the Winslow family’s living room. It examines the ideals and essentials of justice, right and liberty in a civilised society, concluding that these can never be entrusted to any one political party or group of idealists alone, but require the coming together of those few right-minded people in all parties. “We can only hope”, says one of the principal characters towards the end of the play, “that those same people will always prove enough people.” The Winslow Boy opened at the Lyric 
Theatre in London on 23rd May 1946 and was another huge success, Rattigan’s 4th in a row, winning him the 1946 Ellen Terry Award for the best new play produced in London and, when it opened on Broadway a year later, the New York Critics’ award for the Best Foreign Play.
In addition to continuing to write new plays Rattigan was heavily engaged with new film work, writing scripts based both on his own plays and the work of others, including Brighton Rock with Graham Greene and Bond Street with Anatole de Grunwald and Rodney Ackland. By now Rattigan was a celebrity, featuring in newspapers, fashion and style magazines around the world. He seemed able to do no wrong. So it was perhaps surprising that his next play was a one act piece about failure. Set at the end of term in boys public school, The Browning Version centres on a failed school master, Crocker-Harris, who is being forced into early retirement by heart trouble. Feared by his pupils as “the Himmler of the Lower Fifth”, his wife has been driven by his inability to satisfy her sexual needs into having an affair with a popular younger master who is, however, unable to reciprocate her strong feelings. Emotionally “dead” in the eyes of his frustrated wife, the ailing Crocker-Harris is stirred into one small, final act of dignified, self-assertion by a single small gesture of gratitude by one of his pupils. In one brilliantly crafted, concentrated act, lasting just an hour and a quarter, Rattigan explores emotional repression, falsity, failure and the cruelty of love. In the eyes of many it is his masterpiece and the play with which he seemed to identify most strongly. It was produced under the title Playbill with a short one-act farce, Harlequinade, about a theatrical family staging a production of Romeo and Juliet. Rattigan based Harlequinade largely on his own experiences during the Gielgud production at Oxford and while working with the Lunts on Love In Idleness. Playbill opened at London’s Phoenix Theatre on 8th September 1948. Hailed by the critics and public alike, the plays won the Rattigan The Ellen Terry Award for the second year running. However the plays failed on Broadway, the respected American critic Books Atkinson dismissing The Browning Version as “superior hackwork” and Time Magazine condemning both as “bilge”. Elsewhere in the world, however, the plays were generally very well received, one Danish critic hailing The Browning Version as modern version of Strindberg’s Dance of Death.
Rattigan’s next play, Adventure Story, which opened just six months after Playbill, came as a total contrast. It set out to tell in a prologue and eleven scenes the epic story of Alexander The Great as a tragedy of a man who, as Rattigan himself later described it, sets out “to conquer the world before he had succeeded in conquering himself.” Starring Paul Schofield in his first leading West End role as Alexander, the London critics hailed Rattigan’s courage in attempting to tell a story that even Shakespeare had shied away from, but judged that he had over-reached himself, saying that his naturalistic dialogue was not up to the demands of epic drama.
Deeply disappointed, Rattigan buried himself in work on lucrative film projects while at the same time beginning a vigorous public defence of his own dramatic methods. He attacked what he regarded as the unwarranted critical esteem afforded to the works such as those of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw. In a major New Statesman article in March 1950, entitled “Concerning the Play of Ideas”, Rattigan asked why modern dramatists should still be being exhorted to write about “…themes of urgent topicality” after the manner of “late Ibsen or early Shaw?” That he and other dramatists like him refused to do this did not, Rattigan insisted, mean that their minds were empty of ideas. “Ideas, per se, social, political or moral”, he asserted, had no very important place in the theatre: “From Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams the only theatre that has ever mattered is the theatre of character and narrative.” He concluded, “The trouble with the theatre today is not that so few writers refuse to look the facts of the present world in the face but that so many refuse to look at anything else.”
Rattigan knew that this argument was likely to make him unpopular with some people, but he certainly did not expect anything like the intense storm that he provoked, not only in Britain but around the world. Newspapers carried articles by many of the most respected playwrights of the day attacking him. Sean O’ Casey expostulated that “we’d have to get ideas out of life before we could remove them from drama”, adding that, far from killing drama, Ibsen and Shaw had brought it back to singing, serious life. Thinkers, playwrights and poets had, O’Casey reminded Rattigan, “shared in the struggle for the rights of man” and against “intolerance, cod custom, ignorance and fear.” James Bridie accused Rattigan of completely misunderstanding Shaw. Peter Ustinov suggested that Rattigan’s article arouse from hurt pride. Others went further, suggesting that Rattigan had attacked the play of ideas because when he had tackled big themes his ideas, intellect and means of expression had all been found wanting. Bernard Shaw himself joined in the fray, accusing Rattigan of faulty reasoning: “Mr Rattigan does not like my plays because they are not exactly like his own, and no doubt bore him; so he instantly declares that plays that have any ideas in them are bad plays, and indeed not plays at all.” More serious in the long run for Rattigan’s future reputation than all the attacks by established dramatists was that, in the minds of a whole generation of future playwrights and directors who were to enter the theatre later in the 1950s, Rattigan had now irrevocably identified himself with a kind of cautious, commercial theatre which they despised.
As if to confirm this impression, his next play, Who Is Sylvia? evaded all the serious issues which it might have raised. When he started writing it Rattigan had intended it to be an examination of effect on his mother of his father’s long succession of affaires. However, not wishing to hurt his ageing parents by holding his father up to public obloquy or ridicule, he instead produced the lightest of comedies about human folly. Its three acts cover three phases spanning thirty-three years in the life of a Peter Pan figure and his amorous pursuit of three identical girls (all played by the same actress) in the hope of attaining his ‘Sylvia’ even after he has reached an age when he is no longer capable of turning desire into action. After a series of leading actors had turned the play down as not good enough, it opened on 20th October 1950 at London’s Criterion Theatre, the theatre which, fourteen years earlier, had witnessed Rattigan’s youthful triumph with French Without Tears. Who Is Sylvia? even featured two of that earlier success’s original leading actors, so highlighting the contrast between it and that earlier success. Who Is Sylvia? received a critical drubbing: “This Will Not Do, Mr Rattigan” thundered the London Evening Standard. With Rattigan foregoing his royalties to help to keep it afloat, the play managed to stagger on for 381 London performances, but when later adapted into a film, under the title The Man Who Loved Redheads, it received similarly bad reviews and was a financial flop.
In contrast to the two previous critical flops, Rattigan’s next play, was a critical and commercial success. Opening in London in March 1952, The Deep Blue Sea was a deeply serious work, today widely accepted as his finest full length play, born out of the suicide of one Rattigan’s former lovers, an actor called Kenneth Morgan. Morgan had gased himself, three years earlier, in a tiny flat in a run down area off London’s Baker Street after a new lover had proved unable to fully return his love and had left him. The composition of the play had proved a deeply troubled and emotional experience for Rattigan. There seem to have been at least three previous versions of the play before The Deep Blue Sea, as we know it today was accepted for production. In at least one of these earlier versions the two unhappy lovers at its centre had been men. But, in a period when homosexual relationships between men were still illegal, such a play would never have been granted a Lord Chamberlain’s licence for performance in a commercial theatre. Such a play might also have provoked press speculation about Rattigan’s own sexuality. 
In a sense the play that eventually appeared echoed Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Like Ibsen’s Nora, Hester, The Deep Blue Sea’s central character, discovers that she is unable to live through the men in her life and, appearing more than a decade before the general awakening to the specific issues confronting women, it can be seen as culturally prophetic. At the start of the play Hester, having fallen in love with a younger man, Freddie, and left her comfortable life as a judge’s wife, to live with him in a dingy London flat, is rescued by neighbours from an attempt to gas herself. In despair because of her realisation that Freddie will never be capable of fully reciprocating her own intense love for her him, she has decided that the “deep blue sea” of suicide is preferable to “the devil” of her own, always to be denied, need of the all-consuming, reciprocal love of someone whom she herself loves. Over the course of three acts, all set within the space of a single day, the emotional needs and different kinds of love of each of the principal characters is explored, and Hester resolves that rather than escape through suicide, she will try to go on living and face the reality of life on her own. Rattigan himself described the play as “a study of obsession and of the shame that a sensitive, clear-minded and strong-willed woman must feel when she discovers she has inside her a compulsion that seems too strong for her to resist.”
With Peggy Ashcroft as Hester and a young Kenneth More in his first major West Endrole as Freddie, The DeepBlue Sea received generally glowing reviews. A young Kenneth Tynan, although unconvinced by Hester’s final decision to live rather die, hailed it as “the most absorbing new English play for many seasons”. It ran for over 500 performances in London but, on transfer to New York, was slaughtered by the critics. It was later made into a successful film starring Vivien Leigh as Hester.
His next play, The Sleeping Prince, was the lightest of light trifles, in Rattigan’s words “an occasional fairy tale” composed in haste as his contribution to the celebrations surrounding the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The plot, inspired by his father’s experiences as the official host to a Moroccan dignitary during the coronation of George V at the time of Rattigan’s birth in 1911, centres around the confusions that arise when anAmerican chorus girl, hired to entertain a Ruritanian prince in London to attend the coronation, takes the Prince’s empty romantic endearments, intended simply to get her into bed, as real love. When it opened in November 1953 starring Sir Laurence Olivier as the boorish prince and his wife Vivien Leigh as the chorus girl, the critics expressed deep disappointment: “It seems a pity that so much talent should have gone into so little.” However, with two stars of the calibre of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh the play enjoyed a successful run in London and would have run longer if their other commitments had allowed. It was later made into a much talked about film, under the title The Prince and The Showgirl with Olivier again playing the Prince and Marilyn Monroe as the showgirl. However, opening on Broadway three years later, without the benefit of Olivier and Leigh in the leading roles, the play proved, in Noel coward’s words “Completely disastrous.”
The London opening of The Sleeping Prince coincided with the publication of the first two volumes of Rattigan’s Collected Plays with Prefaces penned by Rattigan. Rattigan used these to restate his arguments in defence of his own kind of drama. To articulate his argument he created a comic character called Aunt Edna, an ageing lady playgoer living in a Kensington hotel (like his recently widowed mother, Vera) who ‘knew what she liked’ and dispensed her opinions over the teacups to her fellow hotel residents. With Aunt Edna as his mouthpiece Rattigan claimed that the fact that all the plays in the two volumes had been commercial successes was no reason not to take them seriously. Significantly those Rattigan plays which had not achieved a substantial London run, even the critically well received After The Dance, were excluded from the collection. The critics responded by accusing Rattigan of debasing his talent in pursuit of popularity and commercial success.
Rattigan’s next work to appear, Separate Tables,opened at London’s St James’s Theatre on 22nd September 1954. Two one-acters set in a residential hotel, similar to the one inhabited by his mother and by Aunt Edna, the plays, like so many of his previous plays, dealt with the pain of different and unequal kinds of love and the difficulties of honest sexual expression. The first explores the relationship of a fading fashion model, resident in the hotel, with her violent, drunken, failed Labour politician ex-husband. At the core of their violently failed relationship lie their mutually incompatible sexual and emotional needs. The second play concerns another resident, a bogus retired army major guilty of a minor sexual offence and the attitudes towards 
him of the other hotel residents when his offence is reported in a local newspaper. In contrast to the first play, the second deals with various kinds of emotional repression. In the play’s central scene, reminiscent of the infamous, anti-Communist, McCarthy hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the USA, the residents conduct a trial of the Major in his absence to determine whether to force him to move out of the hotel. A kind a redemption occurs at the end of the play when Sibyl, the emotionally repressed daughter of the hotel’s most overbearing resident who is the Major’s chief accuser, makes a small gesture in defiance of her mother by striking up a tentative friendship with the disgraced Major. The two characters discover in each other a certain fundamental similarity. In the words of the Major: “We’re both of us frightened people, and yet we’ve somehow managed to forget our fright when we’ve been in each other’s company.”
The play largely sprang from a combination of events in Rattigan’s own emotional life and the lives of his friends, and from a recent series of high-profile arrests of prominent figures in the arts and public life accused of homosexual offences – in particular the arrest of Rattigan’s friend and hero, the great actor John Gielgud. In the second play, as originally written by Rattigan, the Major’s offence was a homosexual one. However, the Lord Chamberlain would never have granted such a play a licence for performance in a commercial theatre and Rattigan changed the Major’s offence to ‘touching up’ women in a cinema. Separate Tables was a huge critical and commercial success in both London and New York, notching up 726 performances in the West End and over 300 on Broadway. Made into a film in 1956, starring Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and David Niven, it won seven Academy Awards Nominations, including Best Picture.
In that same year, 1956, Rattigan attended the London first night which was to mark a turning point in the post-war history of the British theatre. The play was John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court Theatre. As he was leaving after the performance a reporter asked him what he had thought of the play and Rattigan replied dismissively that this young man Osborne was simply sitting there saying “Look, ma, I’m not Terence Rattigan.” Widely reported, this remark showed that Rattigan who in his own youth had been something of a radical, was becoming dangerously out of touch with the younger generation. As Kenneth Tynan later wrote, the important point about Look Back In Anger was that it lanced a boil which had been slowly coming to head ever since the end of the war. In the person of Jimmy Porter, Look Back In Anger’s central protagonist, the generation which had grown up since the war had now found its voice and burst triumphantly on to the stage. To them Rattigan and his ilk now represented “the pale side of the establishment”, the people who they intended to “sweep away for a start.”
However, for the moment Rattigan continued blithely on his way, flying and cruising around the world first class and in the Queen Mary, putting up in the best hotels while he discussed new, fabulously well paid Hollywood film projects or looked in on new productions of his plays, his every immaculately groomed move eagerly reported in the gossip columns and fashion magazines. Meanwhile he picked up ideas for new plays, started on one or two, but then dropped them again.
When a new play did finally emerge, in the autumn of 1958, four years after the London opening of Separate Tables, its plot was a characteristically Rattigan amalgam of events in his own live and the lives of his close friends (notably the relationship between the actors Margaret Leighton and Laurence Harvey), and of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias. In Variation on a Theme Rose Fish, Rattigan’s Marguerite Gautier, has married a succession of three wealthy husbands and is about to marry a fourth, a rich German banker. Then she meets Ron, a young ballet dancer who, although living with and being kept by a gay choreographer lover, is willing to bend his sexual tastes to suit his financial desires. Ron makes a successful pass at her, but then, to the surprise of both of them, they fall genuinely in love with other. But having moved in together and thereby ruined both Rose’s financial prospects and Ron’s dancing career, they discover that while drawn irrevocably together they are unable to stop quarrelling and causing each other pain. It is a typical Rattigan relationship made up of forever incompatible sexual and emotional desires. Like Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier, at the end Rose Fish dies of consumption.
Rattigan had originally intended that the play and the actions of the characters in it should be openly homosexual, and that it might perform some of the functions of a personal confession. In the atmosphere of liberal optimism that briefly prevailed following the 1957 publication of the Wolfenden Report calling for abolition of the laws banning homosexual acts between consenting males in private, that had seemed possible. But in the event, neither the public mood nor the cast of Rattigan’s creative mind allowed such a thing.
Although Rattigan had told the press in advance that he expected people to be shocked by the ‘frankness of the theme’ and that he intended the play ‘to blow up the Estabishment’, when Variation on a Theme opened at the Globe Theatre on 8th May 1958 it came as a crashing disappointment. Starring Margaret Leighton in a poor production by John Gielgud, the critics slaughtered it as merely a tame and pallid star-vehicle which, far from being frank or blowing up the Establishment, seemed a downright evasion. They were almost unanimous in detecting that what the play was really meant to be about was a homosexual relationship between a “bored and ageing rentier and a sharp, oily tart.” Their attacks were all the sharper because of the attacks that Rattigan had made on them and the new, younger generation of writers and avante garde figures such as Samuel Beckett.
While Rattigan went off to nurse his hurt feelings among the gambling folk on the French Riviera who he had so recently claimed to despise, further damage to his reputation was done at home when the press picked up the story of a nineteen year old Salford shop-assistant, called Shelagh Delaney, who having seen Variation on a Theme had been so infuriated at the sight of her favourite actress Margaret Leighton traipsing about in what she regarded as feeble rubbish, that she had gone home and in two weeks off work, had written a play of her own, A Taste of Honey. She had sent it to Joan Littlewood who had immediately put it into production at her Theatre Workshop. Opening just two weeks after Variation on a Theme, the critics hailed Delaney’s play as having all the virtues that Rattigan’s lacked: honesty rather than evasion, vigour in place of tired technique.
Rattigan responded by throwing himself into work on a new play, based on an aborted film he had scripted about T.E.Lawrence, who shortly after the end of the first World War had gone into hiding by enlisting in the ranks of the R.A.F. disguised under the name Ross. Over sixteen short scenes Rattigan traced Lawrence’s heroic progress through the war in the Middle East and sought to explain his sudden decision, at the height of his fame after the war, to seek anonymity under the name Ross in the R.A.F. “Oh, Ross”, Rattigan has Lawrence ask himself at the start of the play, “how did I become you?” Rattigan’s finds his answer in Lawrence’s guilt at the discovery of his own sexuality during a brief period of captivity when he was held by the Turks and sexually assaulted. Although some people who were knowledgeable about Lawrence found Rattigan’s answer to the enigma of his behaviour unduly trite, the critics were almost unanimous in their praise, hailing the play as a magnificent piece of story-telling and economic stagecraft. Tynan, the doyenne of the younger critics, was virtually alone in condemning Rattigan’s language as inadequate to telling the epic story of T.E. Lawrence, the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Starring Alec Guinness, and later Michael Bryant, Ross ran for 762 performances at London’s 900 seat Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
To high expectations, just two months after the opening of Ross, a musical version of Rattigan’s first success French without Tears, under an earlier, discarded, title Joie de Vivre, opened at the Queen’s Theatre. In the summer of 1960, with musicals of the calibre of My Fair Lady and the politically pointed musical satires of people like Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop playing to capacity houses in the West End, Joie de Vivre, with music by the composer of the pre-war hit White Horse Inn, Robert Stolz, seemed limp and dated. During the first night the audience booed and jeered, the first time that this had happened to Rattigan, and the next morning the critics were united in their condemnation. Joie de Vivre closed after just four nights.
Deeply hurt, Rattigan lashed out at his fiercest critic, Kenneth Tynan, by writing him a letter in which he condemned Tynan’s championship of Bertold Brecht, claiming that audiences found Brecht “… a cracking, pedantic, didactic, ill-translated old Marxist bore.” Such outbursts, which seemed to outsiders extremely uncharacteristic as Rattigan had before always been noted for his suave, unruffled, unfailingly polite, and charming personality, did nothing to help restore the critics’ faith in him.
For much of the next two years Rattigan swung violently between bouts of frenetic work and intervals of listlessness and heavy drinking. Having 
sworn a few years earlier to waste less of his time on highly paid but creatively worthless film work so as to be able to concentrate his real creative energies on writing stage plays, Rattigan now started devoting an increased amount of his time to working on films. “It’s not for fun, it’s for money,” as he has one of the characters say in explanation of why she is travelling to America in one of his film scripts of this period, The VIPs (Director Anthony Asquith,1963). He also completed his finest original television script Heart to Heart. It was inspired by the way in which in recent years television interviews had made or broken an assortment of public and political figures – for example the way in which Richard Nixon had used television to re-habilitate his political career after being caught up in a California bribery scandal and the British television personality Gilbert Harding, who was noted for his gruff public manner, had broken down in front of the camera and revealed his lonely and vulnerable side when interviewed by John Freeman for his BBC series Face to Face. In Rattigan’s play a cabinet minister with the carefully cultivated public persona as ‘an ordinary no-nonsense bloke’ is cornered on-air by a TV interviewer who comes into possession of information that the politician has accepted bribes. But the politician turns the situation to his own advantage by
making a direct emotional appeal to the TV audience. Transmitted by the BBC in December 1962 in production directed by Alvin Rakoff, Heart to Heart was hailed by the TV critics, as a savage exercise in Establisment de-bunking which brought him into alliance with Osborne and Arnold Wesker.
At the same time as working on Heart to Heart Rattigan also embarked on writing a new stage play, which like Heart to Heart, dealt with public façades covering private corruption. Based on a famous 1930s financial fraud case, Man and Boy explores the relationship between a powerful, seemingly heartless, financier and his estranged, weak, sensitive, ardently socialist son, when the financier is publicly unmasked as a cruel fraudster. The plot hinges on the financier father’s attempt to lure the chairman of a wealthy company, who he knows to be a homosexual, into a financial merger which will save his tottering business empire, by using his attractive son as sexual bait. Rattigan tried to persuade both Rex Harrison and Laurence Olivier to play the leading part of the fraudster financier, Antonescu, but both, fearing for their public reputations if they played such a heartless, openly homosexual villain, turned it down. As a result, and against his better judgement, Rattigan agreed that the faded screen charmer, movie star Charles Boyer should play the part. Man and Boy opened for a limited season in London in September 1963 ahead of an already scheduled opening in New York, in a less than perfect production. It drew the most mixed and contradictory critical reviews of Rattigan’s career. While some found the play hollow, others found it a powerful and faultless exploration of the well-springs of human activity. The play did not receive a production that realised its full emotional and dramatic power until it was directed by Maria Aitken in 2005 with David Suchet in the leading role.
In the week that Man and Boy opened in the London theatre the film The VIPs, scripted by Rattigan out of the experience of being stranded in the VIP lounge at London Airport when a fog descended, opened in London cinemas. This, like so much else of his at this time, received a critical drubbing. Infuriated by one particularly damning review, Rattigan met the critic and in an uncharacteristically frank exchange confessed to how deeply hurt he felt by the critics repeated accusations of debasing his talent in pursuit of commercial success and of becoming no more than a “glib, slick craftsman” with a “cliché-ridden mind.”
Rattigan’s health deteriorated and from 1960 onwards he succumbed to a succession of illnesses until, in the spring of 1963, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. Over the following weeks he attempted to come to terms with the fact “That not only would I die, but I was likely to do so in a short while.” Rather than attempting to write one final masterpiece in the few month that he believed he had left to him, he knuckled down to completing work he already had in hand – the script for the film, The Yellow Rolls Royce, to putting the final touches to Man and Boy and to a new film idea. Persuaded by a few of his closest friends to seek a second medical opinion from a leading authority on leukaemia, it was found that he did not have leukaemia after all. Instead the series of viral illnesses he had suffered in recent years, combined with his long years of heavy drinking, had produced symptoms which appeared remarkably like it.
With the threat of imminent death lifted, Rattigan attended the opening nperformances of Man and Boy in London and New York and then set to work with Noel Coward on writing a BBC Television 90th birthday tribute to Sir Winston Churchill – Ninety Years On. While in New York working on the TV tribute, in December 1963 he attended the first night of The Girl Who Came to Supper, a new musical based on The Sleeping Prince.Scripted by Harry Kurnitz, with lyrics by Noel Coward, it was far better received than the original play had been, some critics going out of their way to say how much Kurnitz had improved on Rattigan’s play.
Although the imminent threat of death had been lifted and film and other fees continued to roll in, he now felt more lonely and bereft than at any time in his life. Shorn of success and the critical esteem on which so much of his fulfilment had always depended, he had drifted apart from many of his true friends of earlier years, while others had died. The high life of parties and heavy drinking continued, but now many of those who surrounded him were not true friends but sycophants and spongers who lived off him. Although he continued to work, he now did so erratically and no longer with the self-imposed discipline of former years. Yet it was in this period that Rattigan spotted the potential of a young playwright, Joe Orton, befriended him and quietly helped to finance the successful transfer of his play Entertaining Mr Sloane into a West End theatre.
In the spring of 1964 Rattigan was commissioned by TV impresario Lew Grade to write a TV play about Lord Nelson as part of a fund-raising campaign for a charity backed by the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip. But try as he might, Rattigan found he could not write it. Explaining his failure to Prince Philip he said Nelson was “too bloody successful. I can’t feel sorry for him, and I can’t write about anybody for whom I can’t feel compassion. I prefer failures.” Prince Philip, however, reminded him that Nelson did suffer one deeply felt failure – he could not persuade the nation to accept his mistress, Emma Hamilton. This fired Rattigan’s imagination and he came up with Nelson – A Portrait in Miniature. He depicted Emma Hamilton as a coarse, over-blown, drunken, ageing whore. While crowds cheer Nelson wherever he goes, when they see Emma they jeer. At one point Nelson confesses a teenage nephew that he can see Emma as others see her and “dies a thousand deaths each day he is with her” but cannot bear to be apart from her. “How can a love be so deep that begins and ends in the bed?” he asks and himself answers that although filled with self-disgust it is the love “most suited to me.” Later, when the play was published, Rattigan dedicated it to the person who for most of the previous twenty years had filled much the same role in his own life, Michael Franklin.
Franklin was a frequent embarrassment to Rattigan, making public scenes and throwing trantrums in front of his friends. A pretty young man almost twenty years younger than Rattigan, he was regarded by Rattigan’s friends as little better than a prostitute. Although he had pretensions to being an interior designer, Franklin made little secret of the fact that above all he wanted to be looked after by some wealthy man, preferably a glamorous leading figure in the arts. As well as his sexual role, Franklin fulfilled a deep, self confessed need in Rattigan, the need to have someone who was dependent on him. Despite many ups and downs, the relationship was to last until the end of Rattigan’s life.
Shortly after the TV transmission of Nelson – A Portrait in Miniature in March 1966 Rattigan decided to move out of England permanently. For years he had been told that for his health’s sake he should live in a warmer climate and the tax advantages of living outside Britain were enormous. So, with his stage work now seemingly hopelessly out of critical fashion, for the next few years he shuttled between homes on Ischia, in France, Hollywood and a house he bought in Bermuda, working on various film and TV scripts, most of which, as is so often the case with films, never got made. Among the TV plays was All On Her Own, transmitted on BBC Television in September 1968, which would later be adapted for the stage under the title Duologue. He also wrote an ambitious stage musical, Pas de Deux. It was set in a ballet company and featured a gay but married ambassador, his young ballet dancer boyfriend – “an emotionally retarded narcissist looking for a father substitute” – and a young ballerina. It was never fully completedf and has never been performed. Nevertheless, in the opinion of the few people who have read the manuscript, it remains one of Rattigan’s most intriguing and challenging works.
In September 1970 a longer stage version of his TV play about Nelson, retitled Bequest to the Nation, opened at London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket, but was badly received. The extent of the change in theatrical fashion was highlighted by London revival of six weeks later of one of his most successful and admired plays, The Winslow Boy. In a damning article headed “Danger: craftsman at work in the magazine New Society, the arts commentator Albert Hunt, dismissed the whole of Rattigan’s output and his much-praised craftsmanship as largely consisting of “setting up the obvious in a somewhat laborious way” and concluded that “It’s facile knowingness that’s at the heart of Rattigan’s theatre.” Every complexity, every facet of human experience could, according to Hunt, in Rattigan’s smug dramatic world be reduced “to a simple matter of manipulation”. But in a lone article in The Observer in the same week, another critic, Ronald Bryden, spotted some of the real and lasting significance of Rattigan’s work. Working in the 1940s, in a theatre and society constrained and hide-bound by an unbending combination of commercialism and respectable, middleclass convention, Rattigan, like writers in Communist Eastern Europe, had been forced to hide the plays he wanted write behind plays that his audiences would accept. Yet Rattigan had still succeeded in showing that behind the face of ‘traditional British decency’ there lurked that other face of Britain, the one that would jail homosexuals, ban foreigners, persecute those who failed to conform.
In June 1971, in time for his sixtieth birthday, Rattigan was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, only the second playwright to be awarded a knighthood since the First World War (Noel Coward was the first). His sixtieth birthday year also saw a number of revivals of his plays, a midnight matinee in his honour at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, a season of his films was shown at the National Film Theatre and he was invited to address a Gallery First Nighters’ Club dinner. But in May 1972 he was again diagnosed with leukaemia. This time there could be no doubt about the correctness of the diagnosis. How long he might live was uncertain. It might be months. It might be years.
But the revivals of his plays continued. Both While the Sun Shines and French Without Tears again had audiences rocking in their seats with laughter – audiences made up predominantly of younger people who were discovering Rattigan for the first time. Even the critics, although rather shamefacedly, began to acknowledge that these plays were “something more than a mere frolic”. Now, as well as taking on additional film projects for money he also settled down to trying achieve his lifetime ambition, to write at least one great play before he died.
What eventually emerged was a double bill of two one act plays. By far the most substantial of the two was In Praise of Love. Based mainly on watching how his friend Rex Harrison he had fought to preserve his wife Kay Kendall’s happiness during her final terminal illness by keeping the seriousness of her condition from her, and in part on an earlier unused comedy about a successful Marxist painter confronted by a conventionally conformist son and in part on elements of autobiography, it was more packed with personal references and allusions than any other of Rattigan’s plays. In Praise of Love explores the relationship between an outwardly boorish Marxist writer, Sebastian, his son, Joey, a youthful idealist and aspiring playwright who incenses his father by campaigning for the Liberal Party, and Sebastian’s wife Lydia. Lydia, a former Estonian refugee who Sebastian rescued at the end of the war from a Berlin brothel where she had been working to save herself from death in a German concentration camp, is dying from leukaemia, but out of her love for Sebastian is determined to keep the truth of her condition from him so as to be able to devote the rest of her time to finding Sebastian someone who will replace her as wife, mother and servant. Unknown to her Sebastian already knows the truth about her condition but is determined to preserve her happiness and so engages in a number of deceptions and stratagems to keep the full seriousness of her condition from her. While on the surface the play takes the form of a comedy of misunderstanding, it quickly builds into a situation of almost unbearable suspense as layer after layer of comedy and pretence is peeled away from each character to reveal the full measure of each one’s unspoken love and pain. As well as being an outstanding dissection of the nature of love and pain, In Praise of Love is as fine a statement about the loss of idealism and illusions in the 1970s as any play by any of the younger British dramatists of the period. The second play in 
the double bill was Before Dawn, a crude burlesque of Tosca. In contrast to the first play, in this love is talked about too much but not felt. In Praise of Love is a small masterpiece. Before Dawn is unaccountably feeble.
Damaged by the weakness of Before Dawn, In Praise of Love did not receive the appreciation from the London critics that it deserved. Michael Billington in The Guardian, who had until then always been a firm Rattigan supporter, dismissed Before Dawn as “a real stinker” and said that in In Praise of Love (billed in the programme as After Lydia) the attempt “to celebrate physical and spiritual passion” the gap “between intention and achievement is cavernous.” On the other hand Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times described After Lydia as “the most piercing exposition of love under great stress that I have ever seen on the stage.” When it opened on Broadway a year later, in December 1974, Before Dawn was dropped and After Lydia (re-titled simply In Praise of Love) was lengthened to make a full evening in the theatre by restoring cuts made in an earlier version of the script. On Broadway Sebastian was played by Rex Harrison who had been a great part of the play’s inspiration. Sadly, however, and to Rattigan’s intense disappointment and frustration, Harrison refused to play the outwardly boorish parts of the character and instead played him as charming throughout, signalling to the audience from the start that he knew the truth about Lydia’s illness. This destroyed the play’s tension and seriously distorted Rattigan’s emotional intentions. Even so, with Harrison in the lead, the New York run achieved a total of 199 performances as against 131 in London. The play’s full power was not realised until given a definitive production in a judiciously slightly cut version by Alvin Rakoff (who had directed Heart to Heart) for Anglia Television in 1977 with Kenneth More and Clair Bloom playing Sebastian and Lydia. 
In the years following the London production of In Praise of Love Rattigan resumed his peripatetic life of shuttling between New York, the South of France and Bermuda as he worked on various highly paid but unrealised film and TV projects. Amongst the TV projects was a BBC commission for a play about the relationship between Nijinsky and Diaghilev. With very little dialogue, Rattigan’s script largely depended on a wealth of finely details camera movements. Free of the overwrought emotions of other Rattigan plays about sexuality, and of the evasiveness of earlier plays by him that touch upon homosexuality, the play is about love, ending with Nijinsky’s madness after Diaghilev withdraws his love and Nijinsky has to confront the fact that his wife Romola’s love for him is no substitute for Diaghilev’s. Sadly, following objections from Nijinsky’s widow, production of the play was postponed and it has remained unproduced.
Another commission was a BBC radio play. For this he returned to an idea that he had had in 1935, while working at the Teddington film studios in the job found for him by his father after he had left Oxford without taking his degree. It concerned a sensational murder case of the time in which Alma Rattenbury, a small-time composer of popular songs married to an older man who was unable to satisfy her sexually, had taken a young man as a lover. The young man had become jealous of the husband when he suspected that Alma Rattenbury was still having sexual relations with him and had murdered the husband by beating him over the head with a mallet. They were jointly charged with murder and Mrs Rattenbury had become the victim of a wave of public prejudice. As the older of the two lovers she was assumed to have led her young man into depravity the result of which had been the murder. When the jury at the lovers’ trial found only the young man guilty, Mrs Rattenbury committed suicide leaving a note in which she spoke of us living in a beautiful world “ … if only we could let ourselves see it.” Framing his play within the trial, Rattigan explores the events and emotions that led up to the murder and shows how public prejudice places different values on the same events. The issues raised by the main narrative are heightened by a sub-plot about a sexually repressed juror whose frigidity has driven her husband into the arms of another woman, and her attitude to the sexual awakening of her adolescent public schoolboy son. Rattigan called the play Cause Célèbre.
Well received when broadcast in October 1975 with a strong cast headed by Diana Dors and songs composed by the real Alma Rattenbury, Cause Célèbre was heard by a rising younger London theatre impresario who approached Rattigan about adapting it for the theatre. Rattigan agreed and set about the difficult task of turning the sequence of short scenes shifting seamlessly from location to location into a stage play. Shortly after returning home to Bermuda for Christmas Rattigan’s cancer specialist contacted him with the results of his latest set of tests: the cancer had now spread to his bones and was spreading further. The time he had left to him was now even shorter than he had originally expected. Rattigan put a brave face on the news, outwardly remaining resolutely cheerful and optimistic. Returning to London for further medical tests he moved into a suite at Claridges rather than stay in hospital. Inviting a reporter to share a bottle of champagne with him he said, “When this happens you suddenly stop counting the cost of anything. So in the time that’s left I shall work harder and indulge myself more.” As well as working on adapting Cause Célèbre for the stage he began work on another long nurtured project, a play about the First World War Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his son Raymond who was killed in the Battle of the Somme. At the same time the revivals of his work continued, with an especially notable revival of The Browning Version, paired with his stage adaptation of his 1968 short TV play Duologue, at a London fringe theatre more normally associated with the avant-garde and the younger generation of theatre radicals. The young audience, like their parents generation thirty years earlier, were held frozen close to tears as the tragedy of Crocker-Harris’s lifelong emotional repression was slowly laid bare. A young American academic, called Holly Hill, wrote the first full length in depth assessment and appreciation of his work and in March 1976 BBC Radio 3 broadcast a deeply perceptive programme about him called Rattigan’s Theatre. In it the young dramatist David Rudkin said, “I think Rattigan is not at all the commercial middlebrow dramatist his image suggests but someone peculiarly haunting and oblique who certainly speaks to me with resonance of existential bleakness and irresoluble carnal solitude.” Rattigan’s work, it seemed, was at last being recognised at its true value and his reputation, which had fallen into such disrepute in the years after the arrival of Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, had at last begun to turn.
In April 1976 Rattigan’s specialist told him that his cancer was now progressing so fast that he did not think he had more than a year to live. The rest his life now became a race against death, against increasing pain and infirmity to complete the theatre version of Cause Célèbre and see it staged. After a fraught production period, during which he was nursed by Pegs French, the wife of the director of his first great stage hit French Without Tears, on 4th July 1977 Rattigan attended the first night of Cause Célèbre at Her Majesty’s Theatre. He had been driven from his hospital bed in a limousine to the theatre and taken in a wheelchair to his seat in the royal box in good time for the performance in the full knowledge that this would be the last of his first nights that he would ever attend. News of his impending death had reached the newspapers and the cheers and solid applause from the audience at the end of the performance were as much for Rattigan himself and in gratitude for many years of fine and enthralling plays as they were for Cause Célèbre. The reviews the next morning were respectful rather than ecstatic, many recognising the breadth and lasting worth of his entire output even more than the merits of this last play. That July, for the first time in over thirty years, he had two plays enjoying successful runs in the West End concurrently. The other play was a revival of Separate Tables. After the wilderness years, following the arrival of Look Back in Anger, he had lived to see the critical and popular revival of his reputation. As he told an old friend, Sheridan Morley, in a final radio interview: it was very gratifying to be acclaimed again in his own lifetime – “I didn’t think it would happen to me. I had hoped, though, that it might.”
Two weeks later, after being driven for one last time through London’s theatreland, past the scenes of earlier triumphs and disasters, he flew back to his home in Bermuda, where he died, with Pegs French sitting beside him, on 30th November 1977.
In the years since his death the number of revivals of Rattigan’s work has continued to grow as has his critical reputation until today he is recognised as one of the great dramatists of the twentieth century and the exemplar the British mid-twentieth century well-made play. In the words of Bernard Levin, writing in the Sunday Times after the opening of Cause Célèbre Rattigan was the playwright who knew “…that in every human being there is a capacity to reflect the divine, and that it is love in all its forms, from the noblest to the most tawdry, that is most likely to show the gleam of that reflection.”
CHRONOLOGY
| 1911 On 10 June Rattigan was born in London. 1925 Rattigan entered Harrow on a scholarship. 1929 Rattigan played cricket for Harrow against Eton at Lords Cricket Ground, in which he later claimed was the happiest year of his life. 1930 On 10 October Rattigan entered Trinity College, Oxford. 1931 Rattigan published his first article, a film review in one of the leading university papers on 31 October. 1933 Rattigan wrote his first play First Episode loosely based on his involvement with an undergraduate friend, Philip Heimann. 1933 First Episode opened at the Q Theatre new Kew Bridge on 11 September. 1934 In March Rattigan left Oxford to be a playwright 1935 Worked with John Gielgud on an adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities 1936 French Without Tears was written and then performed at the Criterion Theatre. The play was a huge success and described by the morning post as "gay, witty, thoroughly contemporary without being unpleasantly modern. 1940 Rattigan served the war in the RAF. 1957 Writes Variation On A Theme |
1960 |