Love in Idleness / Less Than Kind Read online

  In all they gave 452 performances on Broadway, by far Rattigan’s longest US run, and they would have given more if Alfred had not picked up an abdominal problem requiring surgery. Even so, after he recuperated, the Lunts took the show on a long regional tour, ultimately spending around three-and-a-half years as Sir John Fletcher and Olivia Brown, the longest run they ever spent in a single play. Discussing the attraction of the play, Alfred explained: ‘Not since Sardou has there been a writer with such a gift for plot construction as Rattigan,’ elaborating later, ‘The plot line was so strong you couldn’t budge it. You never had any trouble keeping the interest of the audience. You could be tired and sick, but you always held the audience. […] We never played to an empty seat, and we never got a good notice on it either.’27

  A common sentiment in reviews on both sides of the Atlantic was that this was a mediocre work gussied up by superb comic acting. One of the London critics remarked snootily of the play, ‘I would not exactly rush to see it performed by an inferior company.’28 In fact, in the decade after its London premiere, the play showed itself robust enough to survive even without the incomparable Lunts. It was an immediate success across Scandinavia: it was performed under the name Olivia at the Vasateatern, Stockholm, in September 1945, starring married couple Alice and Ernst Eklund (and with their son, Nils, as Michael); it became Ministerin Rakastettu [The Minister’s Wife] at the Kansallisteatteri, Helsinki, a year later; and in February 1950, it had its Danish premiere at the Frederiksberg Theatre, Copenhagen, again under the title Olivia. The play made its way to the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris, in a version heavily Gallicised by Jacques Deval, in which the son became a daughter, the English mother a Polish Countess, and with a new boulevard title, O Ma Maîtresse! Toronto saw it at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1948 and, perhaps more surprisingly, it was produced in Munich, at the Kleine Komödie, eleven years later.29

  A film was never made, though not for want of trying. Rattigan drafted a screenplay with Anatole de Grunwald, which was, at various points, supposed to star Myrna Loy, Marlon Brando, and to be directed by Elia Kazan. Despite considerable interest, the project stalled because of objections to the sanguine depiction of adultery. In the mid-1960s, 20th Century Fox executive Frank McCarthy proposed a new adaptation, updated to the present, relocated to America, stripped of its wartime and political references, with Michael reincarnated as a ‘sort of mod-intellectual, with the tight trousers, long hair, and other appurtenances of his breed’, the debate now being between ‘the elegance and culture of John versus the ultra-modern slobism [sic] of Michael’.30 Needless to say, nothing came of this peculiar idea.31

  The play had an afterlife at home too. The Tennent Players – the provisional wing of ‘Binkie’ Beaumont’s theatre empire – took a new production to the Dolphin Theatre in Brighton; indeed, the Arts Council Report for 1948–49 lists productions by repertory companies in Amersham, Southport, Perth, Colchester, and Sheffield, and another by the Avon Players.32 BBC Radio broadcast it three times, once with Googie Withers and Laidman Browne in 1952, and twice in 1955 with Sonia Dresdel and Ivan Samson. The play certainly survived ‘inferior casts’, and its disappearance from the repertoire is more to do with Rattigan’s critical decline in the late 1950s than any comment on the play’s own merits.

  However, Love in Idleness has not been a beneficiary of the revival in Rattigan’s reputation since the mid-1990s. One of the reasons might be that Rattigan himself was often rather dismissive of the play. Looking back at the process, he suggested that the changes forced on him by the Lunts made it a play he had never wanted to write:

  He [Alfred] was so subtle about it that I didn’t realise he was making me write a new play… Sir John Fletcher, the Minister, that was Alfred’s role, well wasn’t he a little too brutal here? And my, but he was a dreadful reactionary, and in this passage here he was such a disagreeable Tory and ‘they won’t like it, you know’. And he’d lose the audience in this scene here. As I’d written it, Olivia’s son was constantly scoring off Sir John. Gradually, so gradually I didn’t know it myself, the Minister began scoring off Michael, the son. In fact, Michael become a snotty character, while Sir John changed into a fine fellow, good-hearted, a worldly chap doing his best for God, for England, and for Lynn Fontanne, and having to put up with this beastly little bugger of a left-wing socialist.33

  Michael Darlow is sceptical about this, suggesting that this is Rattigan speaking in the mid-sixties, at the lowest point of his fortunes, trying to persuade the world that he too was once an angry young man.34 It is certainly true that Rattigan, at other moments, seemed extremely happy with the changes he was making, writing to his mother during rehearsals: ‘Practically all the rewriting at the moment is concerned with [Alfred’s] part and practically everything that has been done is a big improvement.’35

  In some ways the transition from Less Than Kind to Love in Idleness is indeed a change for the better. The final draft is considerably tighter and pacier than the earlier draft. It is also funnier, with a number of set-piece sequences that read very well, which one can imagine working very effectively on stage. The third act, which is the focus for most of the reconstruction, is much cleaner and clearer, the original being rather burdened by a series of farcical implausibilities. Some of the best sequences – mostly in Act Two, including the scenes with Diana, the speech-writing sequence, and the final moments of the act – are more or less untouched. Indeed, in both plays, the situation is basically the same: Olivia Brown is a widow who has fallen in love with the wealthy right-wing industrialist Sir John Fletcher. When her left-wing son returns home, he disapproves of their relationship and his mother’s new lifestyle, and gives her an ultimatum. In the final act, Michael and Olivia are living back in the middle-class family home. However, Sir John has not given up and he returns, bonding with Michael over women troubles. As the curtain falls, the three are reconciled.

  The differences, however, are decisive and bear out Rattigan’s claim that under the Lunts’ influence, the play’s politics leapt quite sharply to the right. As described above, in an early scene in Less Than Kind, Sir John condescends to being questioned by his prospective stepson, only to find that the young man is alarmingly well-informed about John’s past, how he got to the top of his company through nepotism as much as merit, and the unethical dealings that his company had before the war with countries who are now enemy powers. Sir John first loses the argument and then his temper (pp. 134–136). In Love in Idleness, however, the charge of nepotism is firmly rebutted, and if there were any unethical arms deals in the 1930s, they are passed over in silence. Michael’s arguments are made to look foolish by being couched in the earnest jargon of the far left, and now he is not a young man of independent opinions but a member of a risible organisation whose high-minded treasurer speaks with all the wisdom and experience of his nineteen years. Sir John does not lose his temper but instead tolerates his interrogation with weary good humour, calculated to win the sympathy of an audience (pp. 32–35). Throughout, Sir John’s politics have become more centrist, his behaviour more reasonable, while Michael’s politics are more strident, his behaviour more ridiculous. Conversely, Olivia is the only character who sticks to her decisions in Less Than Kind (which counterpoints Sir John and Michael’s pompous remarks on woman’s irresolution). By Love in Idleness, her avowals about the New World seem comically fervent: the lady doth protest too much, we think.

  The most significant alterations take place in the third act. In Love in Idleness, Michael is unrewardingly pursuing a young woman called Sylvia. John sympathises with Michael over the inscrutability of women and helps him plot how to win her over. Michael, suitably mollified, admits that his political jargon is often deliberate obfuscation for use when he has lost an argument. In Less Than Kind, the situation is considerably more sinister. Michael is evasive about who exactly his new girlfriend is, but it turns out to be Diana, Sir John’s estranged wife. Michael and Sir John bond over Diana’s fickle beh
aviour: Sir John intimates that women like her respond only to material things and offers Michael a job on a salary that might permit him to buy those things. Michael, cornered and still insisting on his political beliefs, grudgingly accepts. In the final moments of the play, however, Sir John tells Olivia that he bribed Diana to dally with the young man. That suggestion darkens the end of Less Than Kind considerably; it complicates the play’s traditional comic resolution and suggests that, after all, John’s ethics may be just as ruthless and brutal – and that money has the morally corrupting power – as Michael had argued all along.36 Michael ends the play not knowing that he has been brutally played with. When Olivia returns to John at the end of Less Than Kind, meanwhile, it is conspicuously underwritten, less as though she is finally reconciled with her true love and more as if she is submitting to brute force.

  This is not, of course, to say that the Lunts were right-wing ideologues, determined to twist the politics of Rattigan’s play. More likely, they were concerned only to shape the play to suit more conventional generic expectations. Some years later, Lynn Fontanne remembered that the problem was not with Sir John but with Michael: ‘he spoiled the play every time he came on. Everybody hated him and he was a lot of the play’. As a result, in Michael Darlow’s words, he ‘killed the comedy’.37 Ay, there’s the rub. Less Than Kind is not – and does not seem intended to be – only a comedy. It has comic moments, but it switches genre throughout, touching on society comedy, farce, domestic melodrama, psychological thriller, and political drama. In making these abrupt shifts in genre, Rattigan is trying to outpace our expectations and allow the action of the play to surprise us. The very end is, if anything, a parody of comic resolution; lacking the well-made play’s traditional scène à faire – in which all secrets are exposed and reconciliation can truly begin – the play is brought to a conclusion by deception, exploitation, and the power of money. Rattigan later claimed to have no interest in the ‘play of ideas’,38 but in Less Than Kind, he wrote one: the shifts of genre and tone pitch us between the characters in a way that generates dialectical friction between their political views, undetermined by narrative convention.

  The end of Act Two – in both versions – is a superb example of the way Rattigan was always able to turn a play’s emotions on a sixpence, by suddenly changing genre. Michael has delivered his ultimatum and Olivia has decided that she must break with Sir John. But almost as soon as she has broken the news to her lover, the first guests arrive for the dinner party Olivia has so carefully arranged. Instantly, the high emotions are replaced by small talk leading us to infer both Olivia and Sir John’s desperation and loss. A few minutes earlier, Olivia had insisted that ‘there isn’t a situation in the world that can’t be passed off with small talk’ (p. 61, Love in Idleness; p. 167, Less Than Kind), an idea perhaps typical of post-Wildean society comedy, but here, beneath the chit-chat, a drama is unfolding, and the genres are in sharp conflict.

  In Less Than Kind, there is an additional irony to savour. We have heard throughout of a beloved married acting couple, the Randalls. They are clearly modelled on the Lunts (‘only the most famous theatrical couple in the world’ [p. 112]). When they arrive, Olivia expresses delight that they are about to ‘play comedy again’ (implying that, like the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night, they have just been in something very serious). She explains: ‘It may be very stupid and insensitive of me, but I do believe that in times like these, it’s much better to make people laugh than to make them cry’ (p. 177). It’s a multiply complex line: in character terms, Olivia might be referring to Michael’s unfeeling behaviour and certainly the word ‘cry’ reminds us of the emotions which we know Olivia and Sir John to be feeling; in cultural terms, it is a reference to the kind of banal remark often heard before Rattigan proved, with Flare Path, that audiences were perfectly prepared to accept fear, loss and death as the stuff of wartime theatre. Finally, in terms of genre, the moment is self-referential: the play the Lunts went into after There Shall Be No Night was, of course, the play we are watching (or would have been watching had Rattigan not been required to rewrite it); but is it a comedy? It has been at moments, but right now we are in the throes of a profound emotional drama and the audience are much more likely to be crying than laughing. It’s a profoundly ironic moment that expresses very clearly the complex play of genre and convention at work in Less Than Kind.

  With our sympathies directed to Sir John in Love in Idleness, we tend to see the play through his eyes. This reduces one of the more remarkable features of Less Than Kind, which is its emphasis on the material, economic underpinnings of the world of the play. The play begins as society comedy, in which we accept the upper-class milieu, immediately lock into the genre, and delight in Olivia’s wily ways in populating her dinner party. But when Michael appears, we begin to see this world afresh. When Olivia explains to him the other rooms in the house, the diegetic world of the play is populated for us through Michael’s confusion and disdain for its riches; his question – how can she afford this? – is our question too. The naturalness of this leisured life is disturbed, made unfamiliar. The economic cost of their lifestyle is constantly referred to, including black-market dealings, and stark comparisons of upper- and middle-class life. When Michael discovers the relationship between his mother and Sir John, his implication that she is acting as a kind of high-class courtesan is left hanging in the air. Later Olivia defends herself by giving a starkly honest account of her former husband’s failings, the financial difficulties they found themselves in, which provides a context for her readiness to accept a life of financial security, even luxury (p. 171). These harsh speeches are softened and sentimentalised in the final draft: gone is any resentment of her ex-husband; gone, too, are the details of her leisured life with John. The materialism of Less Than Kind, which functions as a kind of critique of society comedy as a genre, is replaced by a mushy idealism, a vague notion that love overcomes any obstacle.

  These debates, and the different positions within them, had particular force in 1944. The Depression of the 1930s was accompanied by humiliating systems of means-testing for the needy, gross inequalities of healthcare, education, and welfare between rich and poor. For many people in Britain, when war broke out, their standard of living went up. Rationing guaranteed certain basic standards of nutrition; unemployment was greatly reduced; increased and progressive tax rates reduced income inequalities; healthcare was nationally organised under the Emergency Medical Service and through Government direction of and support for voluntary hospitals. When William Beveridge published his famous report in December 1942 – recommending Government action to slay the five Giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness – it caught the national mood. Public opinion moved sharply to the left during the war, culminating in the – for some – surprise defeat of Churchill in the 1945 General Election, and a landslide for a campaigning Labour Government under Attlee.

  The theatre was a forum for addressing these debates. In the West End and sponsored by CEMA – a forerunner of the Arts Council – plays were produced which asked very precisely what sort of world we should demand when the war was over. J. B. Priestley was a key figure here; plays like They Came to a City (1943) elliptically debated the possibility of socialism; An Inspector Calls (1946) was an unmistakeable warning about the consequences of returning to the values of a the pre-war world, notably in the titular Inspector’s implicitly revolutionary final warning: ‘We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.’39 The Army Bureau of Current Affairs formed a Play Unit to create short dramas, to be played to serving soldiers and officers, designed to stimulate debate and thinking about the war and its aftermath. These included the self-explanatory What are We Fighting For? and Where Do We Go From Here? These plays were running at the Arts Theatre, London, during the 1945 election.

>   This is the context in which Less Than Kind and Love in Idleness should best be seen. In writing both versions, Rattigan was asking serious questions about the values that should govern the post-war world. And this was not an abstract question for him either. In the 1930s, Rattigan was very much on the left of politics, campaigning for the British Government to support the Republicans in Spain, and briefly flirting with joining the Communist Party.40 When the war broke out, he was no longer the pacifist he had been at Oxford, but it was still a surprise to his friends when he joined the RAF. In September 1944, while beginning work on the rewrites of Less Than Kind that would eventually produce Love in Idleness, Rattigan was invited to dinner by society hostess, Lady Juliet Duff. Among the other dinner guests was the Conservative MP, Henry Channon.

  ‘Chips’ Channon, as he was known, was never a major figure in the Conservative Party. He had been an outspoken advocate of appeasement in the 1930s and remained firmly on the side of Chamberlain against Churchill throughout the war. He was also a snob and a flatterer and once admitted himself driven, almost exclusively, by ‘lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels’.41 He was, however, handsome and immensely well-connected, and he took to Rattigan immediately. Rattigan, in his turn, was flattered to be wooed by him, invited to the exclusive parties in Channon’s Eaton Square town house. Channon opened up a ‘world of Westminster politics and the smart London dinner party’, as one of Rattigan’s biographers puts it: precisely the world of Love in Idleness.42