Who is Sylvia? and Duologue Read online

  1953 saw Rattigan’s romantic comedy The Sleeping Prince, planned as a modest, if belated, contribution to the Coronation festivities. However, the project was hypertrophied by the insistent presence of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the cast and the critics were disturbed to see such whimsy from the author of The Deep Blue Sea.

  Two weeks after its opening, the first two volumes of Rattigan’s Collected Plays were published. The preface to the second volume introduced one of Rattigan’s best-known, and most notorious creations: Aunt Edna. ‘Let us invent,’ he writes, ‘a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it.’24 Rattigan paints a picture of this eternal theatregoer, whose bewildered disdain for modernism (‘Picasso – “those dreadful reds, my dear, and why three noses?” ’)25 make up part of the particular challenge of dramatic writing. The intertwined commercial and cultural pressures that the audience brings with it exert considerable force on the playwright’s work.

  Rattigan’s creation brought considerable scorn upon his head. But Rattigan is neither patronising nor genuflecting towards Aunt Edna. The whole essay is aimed at demonstrating the crucial role of the audience in the theatrical experience. Rattigan’s own sense of theatre was learned as a member of the audience, and he refuses to distance himself from this woman: ‘despite my already self-acknowledged creative ambitions I did not in the least feel myself a being apart. If my neighbours gasped with fear for the heroine when she was confronted with a fate worse than death, I gasped with them’.26 But equally, he sees his job as a writer to engage in a gentle tug-of-war with the audience’s expectations: ‘although Aunt Edna must never be made mock of, or bored, or befuddled, she must equally not be wooed, or pandered to or cosseted’.27 The complicated relation between satisfying and surprising this figure may seem contradictory, but as Rattigan notes, ‘Aunt Edna herself is indeed a highly contradictory character.’28

  But Rattigan’s argument, as in the ‘Play of Ideas’ debate before it, was taken to imply an insipid pandering to the unchallenging expectations of his audience. Aunt Edna dogged his career from that moment on and she became such a byword for what theatre should not be that in 1960, the Questors Theatre, Ealing, could title a triple-bill of Absurdist plays, ‘Not For Aunt Edna’.29

  Rattigan’s next play did help to restore his reputation as a serious dramatist. Separate Tables was another double-bill, set in a small Bournemouth hotel. The first play develops Rattigan’s familiar themes of sexual longing and humiliation while the second pits a man found guilty of interfering with women in a local cinema against the self-appointed moral jurors in the hotel. The evening was highly acclaimed and the subsequent Broadway production a rare American success.

  However, Rattigan’s reign as the leading British playwright was about to be brought to an abrupt end. In a car from Stratford to London, early in 1956, Rattigan spent two and a half hours informing his Oxford contemporary George Devine why the new play he had discovered would not work in the theatre. When Devine persisted, Rattigan answered ‘Then I know nothing about plays.’ To which Devine replied, ‘You know everything about plays, but you don’t know a fucking thing about Look Back in Anger.’30 Rattigan only barely attended the first night. He and Hugh Beaumont wanted to leave at the interval until the critic T. C. Worsley persuaded them to stay.31

  The support for the English Stage Company’s initiative was soon overwhelming. Osborne’s play was acclaimed by the influential critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, and the production was revived frequently at the Court, soon standing as the banner under which that disparate band of men (and women), the Angry Young Men, would assemble. Like many of his contemporaries, Rattigan decried the new movements, Beckett and Ionesco’s turn from Naturalism, the wild invective of Osborne, the passionate socialism of Wesker, the increasing influence of Brecht. His opposition to them was perhaps intemperate, but he knew what was at stake: ‘I may be prejudiced, but I’m pretty sure it won’t survive,’ he said in 1960, ‘I’m prejudiced because if it does survive, I know I won’t.’32

  Such was the power and influence of the new movement that Rattigan almost immediately seemed old-fashioned. And from now on, his plays began to receive an almost automatic panning. His first play since Separate Tables (1954) was Variation on a Theme (1958). But between those dates the critical mood had changed. To make matters worse, there was the widely publicised story that nineteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney had written the successful A Taste of Honey in two weeks after having seen Variation on a Theme and deciding that she could do better. A more sinister aspect of the response was the increasingly open accusation that Rattigan was dishonestly concealing a covert homosexual play within an apparently heterosexual one. The two champions of Osborne’s play, Tynan and Hobson, were joined by Gerard Fay in the Manchester Guardian and Alan Brien in the Spectator to ask ‘Are Things What They Seem?’33

  When he is not being attacked for smuggling furtively homosexual themes into apparently straight plays, Rattigan is also criticised for lacking the courage to ‘come clean’ about his sexuality, both in his life and in his writing.34 But neither of these criticisms really hit the mark. On the one hand, it is rather disingenuous to suggest that Rattigan should have ‘come out’. The 1950s were a difficult time for homosexual men. The flight to the Soviet Union of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 sparked off a major witch-hunt against homosexuals, especially those in prominent positions. Cecil Beaton and Benjamin Britten were rumoured to be targets.35 The police greatly stepped up the investigation and entrapment of homosexuals and prosecutions rose dramatically at the end of the forties, reaching a peak in 1953–4. One of their most infamous arrests for importuning, in October 1953, was that of John Gielgud.36

  But neither is it quite correct to imply that somehow Rattigan’s plays are really homosexual. This would be to misunderstand the way that homosexuality figured in the forties and early fifties. Wartime London saw a considerable expansion in the number of pubs and bars where homosexual men (and women) could meet. This network sustained a highly sophisticated system of gestural and dress codes, words and phrases that could be used to indicate one’s sexual desires, many of them drawn from theatrical slang. But the illegality of any homosexual activity ensured that these codes could never become too explicit, too clear. Homosexuality, then, was explored and experienced through a series of semi-hidden, semi-open codes of behaviour; the image of the iceberg, with the greater part of its bulk submerged beneath the surface, was frequently employed.37 And this image is, of course, one of the metaphors often used to describe Rattigan’s own playwriting.

  Reaction came in the form of a widespread paranoia about the apparent increase in homosexuality. The fifties saw a major drive to seek out, understand, and often ‘cure’ homosexuality. The impetus of these investigations was to bring the unspeakable and underground activities of, famously, ‘Evil Men’ into the open, to make it fully visible. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 was, without doubt, a certain kind of liberalising document in its recommendation that consensual sex between adult men in private be legalised. However the other side of its effect is to reinstate the integrity of those boundaries – private/public, hidden/exposed, homosexual/heterosexual – which homosexuality was broaching. The criticisms of Rattigan are precisely part of this same desire to divide, clarify and expose.

  Many of Rattigan’s plays were originally written with explicit homosexual characters (French Without Tears, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables, for example), which he then changed.38 But many more of them hint at homosexual experiences and activities: the relationship between Tony and David in First Episode, the Major in Follow My Leader who is blackmailed over an incident in Baghdad (‘After all,’ he explains, ‘a chap’s only human, and it was a deuced hot night – ’),39 the suspiciously polymorphous servicemen of While the Sun Shines, Alexander the Great and T. E. Lawrence from Adventure Story and Ross, Mr Miller in The Deep Blue Sea and several others. Furthermo
re, rumours of Rattigan’s own bachelor life circulated fairly widely. As indicated above, Rattigan always placed great trust in the audiences of his plays, and it was the audience that had to decode and reinterpret these plays. His plays cannot be judged by the criterion of ‘honesty’ and ‘explicitness’ that obsessed a generation after Osborne. They are plays which negotiate sexual desire through structures of hint, implications and metaphor. As David Rudkin has suggested, ‘the craftsmanship of which we hear so much loose talk seems to me to arise from deep psychological necessity, a drive to organise the energy that arises out of his own pain. Not to batten it down but to invest it with some expressive clarity that speaks immediately to people, yet keeps itself hidden.’40

  The shifts in the dominant view of both homosexuality and the theatre that took place in the fifties account for the brutal decline of Rattigan’s career. He continued writing, and while Ross (1960) was reasonably well received, his ill-judged musical adaptation of French Without Tears, Joie de Vivre (1960), was a complete disaster, not assisted by a liberal bout of laryngitis among the cast, and the unexpected insanity of the pianist.41 It ran for four performances.

  During the sixties, Rattigan was himself dogged with ill-health: pneumonia and hepatitis were followed by leukaemia. When his death conspicuously failed to transpire, this last diagnosis was admitted to be incorrect. Despite this, he continued to write, producing the successful television play Heart to Heart in 1962, and the stage play Man and Boy the following year, which received the same sniping that greeted Variation on a Theme. In 1964, he wrote Nelson – a Portrait in Miniature for Associated Television, as part of a short season of his plays.

  It was at this point that Rattigan decided to leave Britain and live abroad. Partly this decision was taken for reasons of health; but partly Rattigan just seemed no longer to be welcome. Ironically, it was the same charge being levelled at Rattigan that he had faced in the thirties, when the newspapers thundered against the those who had supported the Oxford Union’s pacifist motion as ‘woolly-minded Communists, practical jokers and sexual indeterminates’.42 As he confessed in an interview late in his life, ‘Overnight almost, we were told we were old-fashioned and effete and corrupt and finished, and… I somehow accepted Tynan’s verdict and went off to Hollywood to write film scripts.’43 In 1967 he moved to Bermuda as a tax exile. A stage adaptation of his Nelson play, as Bequest to the Nation, had a lukewarm reception.

  Rattigan had a bad sixties, but his seventies seemed to indicate a turnaround in his fortunes and reputation. At the end of 1970, a successful production of The Winslow Boy was the first of ten years of acclaimed revivals. In 1972, Hampstead Theatre revived While the Sun Shines, and a year later the Young Vic was praised for its French Without Tears. In 1976 and 1977 The Browning Version was revived at the King’s Head and Separate Tables at the Apollo. Rattigan briefly returned to Britain in 1971, pulled partly by his renewed fortune and partly by the fact that he was given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours list. Another double-bill followed in 1973: In Praise of Love comprised the weak Before Dawn and the moving tale of emotional concealment and creativity, After Lydia. Critical reception was more respectful than usual, although the throwaway farce of the first play detracted from the quality of the second.

  Cause Célèbre, commissioned by BBC Radio and others, concerned the Rattenbury case, in which Alma Rattenbury’s aged husband was beaten to death by her eighteen-year-old lover. Shortly after its radio premiere, Rattigan was diagnosed with bone cancer. Rattigan’s response, having been through the false leukaemia scare in the early sixties, was to greet the news with unruffled elegance, welcoming the opportunity to ‘work harder and indulge myself more’.44 The hard work included a play about the Asquith family and a stage adaptation of Cause Célèbre, but, as production difficulties began to arise over the latter, the Asquith play slipped out of Rattigan’s grasp. Although very ill, he returned to Britain, and on 4 July 1977, he was taken by limousine from his hospital bed to Her Majesty’s Theatre, where he watched his last ever premiere. A fortnight later he had a car drive him around the West End where two of his plays were then running before boarding the plane for the last time. On 30 November 1977, in Bermuda, he died.

  As Michael Billington’s perceptive obituary noted, ‘his whole work is a sustained assault on English middle-class values: fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex’.45 In death, Rattigan began once again to be seen as someone critically opposed to the values with which he had so long been associated, a writer dramatising dark moments of bleak compassion and aching desire.

  Notes

  1.Quoted in Rattigan’s Daily Telegraph obituary (1 December 1977).

  2.Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson. Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work. London and New York: Quartet Books, 1979, p. 26.

  3.See, for example, Sheridan Morley. ‘Terence Rattigan at 65.’The Times. (9 May 1977).

  4.Terence Rattigan. Preface. The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan: Volume Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, p. xv.

  5.Ibid., p. viii.

  6.Ibid., p. vii.

  7.Ibid., p. vii.

  8.cf. Sheridan Morley, op. cit.

  9.Humphrey Carpenter. OUDS: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. With a Prologue by Robert Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 123.

  10.Rattigan may well have reprised this later in life. John Osborne, in his autobiography, recalls a friend showing him a picture of Rattigan performing in an RAF drag show: ‘He showed me a photograph of himself with Rattigan, dressed in a tutu, carrying a wand, accompanied by a line of aircraftsmen, during which Terry had sung his own show-stopper, ‘I’m just about the oldest fairy in the business. I’m quite the oldest fairy that you’ve ever seen”.’ John Osborne. A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, Volume I 1929–1956. London: Faber and Faber, 1981, p. 223.

  11.Darlow and Hodson op. cit., p. 83.

  12.Norman Gwatkin. Letter to Gilbert Miller, 28 July 1938. in: Follow My Leader. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence: LR 1938. [British Library].

  13.Richard Huggett. Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West Theatre 1933–1973. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989, p. 308.

  14.Terence Rattigan. Preface. The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan: Volume One. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, p. xiv.

  15.George Bernard Shaw, in: Keith Newman. Two Hundred and Fifty Times I Saw a Play: or, Authors, Actors and Audiences. With the facsimile of a comment by Bernard Shaw. Oxford: Pelagos Press, 1944, p. 2.

  16.Henry Channon. Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. Edited by Robert Rhodes James. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, p. 480. Entry for 29 September 1944.

  17.Tom Driberg. Ruling Passions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977, p. 186.

  18.See, for example, Norman Hart. ‘Introducing Terence Rattigan,’ Theatre World. xxxi, 171. (April 1939). p. 180 or Ruth Jordan. ‘Another Adventure Story,’ Woman’s Journal. (August 1949), pp. 31–32.

  19.Audrey Williamson. Theatre of Two Decades. New York and London: Macmillan, 1951, p. 100.

  20.Terence Rattigan. ‘Concerning the Play of Ideas,’ New Statesman and Nation. (4 March 1950), pp. 241–242.

  21Terence Rattigan. ‘The Play of Ideas,’ New Statesman and Nation. (13 May 1950), pp. 545–546. See also Susan Rusinko, ‘Rattigan versus Shaw: The ‘Drama of Ideas’ Debate’. in: Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies: Volume Two. Edited by Stanley Weintraub. University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982. pp. 171–78.

  22.John Elsom writes that Rattigan’s plays ‘represented establishment writing’. Post-War British Drama. Revised Edition. London: Routledge, 1979, p. 33.

  23.B. A. Young. The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character. Hamish Hamilton: London, 1986, pp. 102–103; and Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 196, 204n.

  24.Terence Rattigan. Coll. Plays: Vol. Two. op. cit., pp. xi–xii.

  25.Ibid., p. xii.


  26.Ibid., p. xiv.

  27.Ibid., p. xvi.

  28.Ibid., p. xviii.

  29.Opened on 17 September 1960. cf. Plays and Players. vii, 11 (November 1960).

  30.Quoted in Irving Wardle. The Theatres of George Devine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978, p. 180.

  31.John Osborne. Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Volume II 1955–1966. London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 20.

  32.Robert Muller. ‘Soul-Searching with Terence Rattigan.’ Daily Mail. (30 April 1960).

  33.The headline of Hobson’s review in the Sunday Times, 11 May 1958.

  34.See, for example, Nicholas de Jongh. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 55–58.

  35.Kathleen Tynan. The Life of Kenneth Tynan. Corrected Edition. London: Methuen, 1988, p. 118.

  36.Cf. Jeffrey Weeks. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Revised and Updated Edition. London and New York: Quartet, 1990, p. 58; Peter Wildeblood. Against the Law. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955, p. 46. The story of Gielgud’s arrest may be found in Huggett, op. cit., pp. 429–431. It was Gielgud’s arrest which apparently inspired Rattigan to write the second part of Separate Tables, although again, thanks this time to the Lord Chamberlain, Rattigan had to change the Major’s offence to a heterosexual one. See Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 228.