Who is Sylvia? and Duologue Page 5

  Neither for the first nor last time, the critics would not allow Rattigan to innovate, preferring to see him as a conventional writer, working in conventional dramatic forms.

  Rattigan was confident that ‘normal audiences’ would be less flustered by Who is Sylvia?’s playfulness with tone and genre, and consoled himself that the ‘box-office is quite active’.53 Indeed, a little over two months later, critic Harold Hobson reported to the Christian Science Monitor that ‘Who is Sylvia? is one of the big successes of the current season. The critics didn’t like it and are considerably exasperated to find that the public which is crowding the Criterion Theatre at every performance, isn’t paying any attention to their opinion.’54 The play eventually ran for almost a year, notching up a highly respectable 381 performances. Rattigan did not benefit directly, having agreed to waive his royalty in order to keep this very personal play running.

  There was talk of a film adaptation before Who is Sylvia? had made its stage debut. Cary Grant was said to be interested in playing Mark, with Carol Reed (most famous for The Third Man in 1949) directing.55 When the film finally appeared, it was refashioned around the attributes of its female star, Moira Shearer: the second-act Nora is transformed into Olga, a Russian ballerina, giving Shearer a chance to showcase her former career as a ballet dancer, while the play is retitled The Man Who Loved Redheads to correspond to Shearer’s Titian curls. The play is opened up, as was customary, with its most interesting innovation being a rather eccentric narrator, voiced by Kenneth More, who barely seems on top of the story. When the film opened in January 1955, one reviewer praised it as ‘one of the best British comedies for some time. A laughter-maker that cannot fail to do excellent box-office business.’56

  The play was performed (as Vem är Sylvia?), at the Vasateatern with Håkan Westergren in the lead, in September 1951, to considerable acclaim; and, some time later, at the Olimpia Theatre, in Milan, under the title Sylvia, directed by Ernesto Calindri, who also took the role of Oscar, with celebrated actor Franco Volpi in the leading role. Then, apart from a scattering of amateur productions, the play was almost entirely neglected, out of print for over fifty years.

  With hindsight, we can see Who is Sylvia? as a rather different thing from the ‘frivolity’ that opened uncertainly onto the Criterion stage in October 1950. It has some moments of terrific comedy – Oscar’s arrival in Act One, Denis’s in Act Two, and Mark’s protests against Caroline in Act Three, for example – but it also has what Michael Darlow calls ‘a sense of something darker lurking beneath the surface’.57

  What was the lurking darkness? In some ways, Rattigan was trying to come to terms with his father’s faithless behaviour, though Frank did not get to see himself affectionately guyed on the Criterion stage. In July 1949, as his son was writing the play, he suffered a stroke; in September 1950, with the play in late rehearsal, he broke his leg and, despite hospital treatment, was clearly in decline. He died eighteen months later. But also, Rattigan is placing himself before the theatre’s examining gaze. His search for love, his promiscuity, the need for secrecy, all are dramatised here, comically and sympathetically. And, in a kind of living re-enactment of Mark’s final epiphany, in the autumn in which Who is Sylvia? opened, after twenty years of casual, short-lived relationships, Rattigan met Michael Franklin, a young man who became his lover, and would become a constant companion for the rest of his life.

  The stakes for Who is Sylvia? were very high. Despite its unevenness, it remains one of Rattigan’s most experimental and unsettling plays. It is the work of a mature playwright asking himself how to live and how to love.

  Duologue

  If Who is Sylvia? represents Rattigan coming to terms with his father’s life, Duologue is about his mother’s. The play began life as a piece for television, in a series called A Touch of Venus (subtitled: ‘Women Alone’), that comprised short monologues for women written by established playwrights: amongst the other authors in the series were J.B. Priestley, Emlyn Wiliams, and Frank Marcus. Rattigan wrote All On Her Own for one of his favourite actresses, Margaret Leighton, and it was broadcast on BBC2 in September 1968.

  Rosemary is a widow who returns from a party and, a little drunkenly, starts addressing her dead husband. Through her reflections and recriminations, she comes to a sad realisation about their relationship, her behaviour, and the nature of his death. Margaret Leighton, immaculately coiffured, enormously elegant, her face just occasionally cracking to show fear, loneliness, misery, gives a very effective performance. The character’s drunkenness gives her voice an insubstantial fluency, a sing-song quality, which manages to give a haunting quality to the naturalism of her performance. And despite the theatrical conventions of television production of the time, Leighton’s performance is very televisual, low-key, detailed and subtle.58 The monologue feels like a forerunner to a series like Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads twenty years later.

  Unusually for a television play, All On Her Own was published, in an American collection of Best Short Plays of 1970.59 In 1974, a copy came into the hands of Alan and Maria Riccio Bryce, who had just started a small lunchtime fringe theatre in Kingston, opposite the railway station, called the Overground Theatre. They were looking for short plays and Maria had some experience acting in a New York university workshop production of Separate Tables, and she decided to direct a production. Margaret Stallard was engaged to play Rosemary. The Overground was very small, seating no more than thirty, and the play ran for just under a week, and played to an audience of 111.60

  This was a far cry from the huge West End successes of Rattigan’s golden era, but it was also a sign of a new generation, schooled in fringe theatre in rooms above pubs rather than glamorous openings on Shaftesbury Avenue. Two years later, in January 1976, Rattigan’s revival got a significant boost when the King’s Head, another fringe theatre, revived The Browning Version. Originally, Rattigan’s one-act play was paired with Carol’s Christmas by Frank Marcus, but the success of The Browning Version led to talk of a possible transfer. Rattigan told the Sunday Times, ‘they wanted a curtain raiser. So I’ve redone this TV thing. It’s about a woman in Hampstead reminiscing about her dead husband and gradually she begins to voice his thoughts as well as her own.’ It was also an opportunity to find a stronger name for the play: ‘Normally I’m secretive about titles but I’ll tell you this one. I’m calling it Duologue. I’m rather pleased with that.’61 He took the opportunity to reinstate some of the cuts he had made for the television programme and gave his heroine a last name, Hodge.62 This final version of the script has never been published until now.

  It displays many of Rattigan’s great merits as a playwright but in a form that he rarely otherwise attempted. Duologue is a monologue – and everything about it is contained in that paradoxical phrase. Rosemary is alone in her big house in Hampstead; she has convinced herself and tries to convince everyone else that she is quite happy alone, but as the play goes on her longing for Gregory, her departed husband, steals upon her. She begins to inhabit his voice and to let his voice inhabit her. Sensuously, daringly, at one point she stretches out on the sofa on which used to sleep: ‘as if consciously committing a blasphemous act’, remarks Rattigan, noting the morbid eroticism of her longing (p. 116). A thread of sexual implication runs through the piece: she ventriloquises Gregory discussing their sex life, making clear his rejected advances, his masturbation, their rows and (what we would now call) ‘makeup sex’ (p. 119).

  It’s a play that works through absence. The absence of Rosemary’s interlocutor, the absence of her feelings, the literal absence of another actor onstage. The television production uses several point-of-view shots of the sofa, and we half-expect the husband to appear, to be willed into existence. Onstage, it is more complex; we are used to a stage convention of someone speaking to an unseen interlocutor, so there is some ambivalence about whether Gregory is there or not. Her tenderness towards him, the aching eroticism of lying in his place, is therefore amplified by the stage ima
ge, and gives even more power to her yearning for her husband. Towards the end of the monologue, she seems to have persuaded herself that it is her husband’s spirit speaking through her and she asks him to tell her if she killed him: ‘Open a door, break a window, upset a table? Make me some sign!’ (p. 121). There is silence and she makes one last plea, at which point the clock strikes midnight. But is that her answer? The clock would have struck anyway. Rosemary gets no resolution and the play, bleakly, leaves her lonelier than ever.

  Early in the monologue, Rosemary reports on her book-group meeting at which she made a rather high-handed speech denouncing Kafka: ‘Kafka strikes no chord on my piano. I’m afraid I don’t believe in nameless fears. I believe that all fears can be named and once named can be exorcised’ (p. 114). The ending of the play shows precisely how hollow that sentiment is. But note also that her hasty rejection of Kafka is an echo of a similar middle-class, middle-brow lady. In 1953, Rattigan characrerised ‘Aunt Edna’ as a woman who would say of Kafka ‘so obscure, my dear, and why always look on the dark side of things?’63 Here, Rattigan is making clear the inadequacy of such a view, in a world shadowed by loneliness and loss.

  Rattigan had always been very close to his mother, yet for him she was also his Aunt Edna, a conservative, judgemental figure whom he struggled to defy. He had always been very careful to mask his homosexuality from her, but by the late sixties he stopped bothering, almost flaunting his sexuality. In some of his later plays, he perhaps draws portraits of his mother: in the imperious seaside tyrant Mrs Railton-Bell from Separate Tables (a play he dedicated to his mother) and the prudish, moralistic Edith Davenport in Cause Célèbre.64 Rosemary Hodge is perhaps another portrait of a woman who professed to despise her husband in life – as Vera did Frank – but only came to understand her real feelings after his death and to accept the value of sexual desire. Finally, though, we might also see an image of Rattigan himself in Gregory. Rattigan was dying when he wrote Duologue and he knew it. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to detect a note in this play of a scorned playwright telling the world: you may not like me now, but you’ll miss me when I’m gone.

  Duologue, like Who is Sylvia?, is unique in Rattigan’s work. Both plays take risks with dramaturgy, strike out in new directions. Both plays have tended to be marginalised by most readers of Rattigan’s work. Publishing them together offers us an opportunity to see the range of Rattigan’s work, as well as its depth, and his constant attempt to test the limits of his powers as a playwright.

  DAN REBELLATO

  Notes

  1. See pp. xi-xiii of this volume.

  2. Darlow, Michael. Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work. London: Quartet, 2000, p. 235.

  3. See my introduction to Terence Rattigan. The Deep Blue Sea. London: Nick Hern Books, 1999, pp. xviii-xxxvi.

  4. Terence Rattigan. Letter to Rex Harrison. 15 February 1950. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74346 A.

  5. File 74342 in the Rattigan archive in the British Library is described, based on the cover sheet, as amendments to Who is Sylvia? made in 1954 and sent to Roger Machell of Hamish Hamilton, Rattigan’s publisher. But Hamish Hamilton had already published the play by 1954, both in an individual edition and in the second volume of the Collected Plays, so it is more likely that Rattigan sent the manuscript of the final draft of the play to Machell as a gift but the cover page had remained in the archive. The contents of this file actually appear to be structural plans for Acts One and Three of the play, notes on theme and characters, and drafts of the first half of Act One and a few pages from Act Two. They offer an unusually vivid insight into Rattigan’s thinking and creative processes but, perhaps because of being misdescribed in the catalogue, they have not been drawn on before, which is why I have quoted very fully from them. I shall refer to these papers as The Search for May.

  6. Green After April’s second act is set in 1930.

  7. His surname also changes, from Arbour to Green (explaining the punning title Green After April) to Wright, while it is his wife’s given name that alters, from Isabel to Mary to Caroline. Mark’s family title, Lord Binfield, is evidently a little nod to the area where he composed the first draft of the play.

  8. The Search for May, p. 14. In these initial notes, Williams was imagined to be a woman housekeeper and Daphne was called Doris.

  9. Ibid., pp. 5-6. Égalités and en plein are terms from casino gambling: betting on égalité is a relatively safe bet while betting en plain is staking all on a single number or card.

  10. Ibid., p. 26.

  11. Terence Rattigan. Letter to Rex Harrison. op. cit.

  12. Quoted in Darlow, op. cit., p. 257.

  13. Ibid., p. 256. Frank had four months of military service in France and Belgium during the First World War before being invalided out, and wrung every drop of use out of his military title. In Who is Sylvia?, it is Oscar who adopts the title ‘Major’ to attract women. (Later, of course, in Separate Tables, Rattigan would create another bogus major with a different kind of roving eye.)

  14. The Search for May, op. cit. p. 6.

  15. Geoffrey Wansell’s biography contains the fanciful suggestion that Frank was forced out of the Diplomatic Service after an affair with Princess Elisabeth of Romania (Terence Rattigan. London: 4th Estate, 1995, p. 23). Michael Darlow’s biography (rightly I think) pours cold water on this suggestion, identifying Terry as the source of the rumour, dramatising his father’s behaviour to a schoolmate (op. cit., p. 51).

  16. Wansell op. cit., p. 204; Darlow, op. cit., p. 256.

  17. The Search for May, op. cit., p. 7.

  18. Darlow, op. cit., p. 131.

  19. Quoted in Dan Rebellato. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern Theatre. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 195. That section (pp. 193–200) gives much more information about the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis in thinking about homosexuality at the time.

  20. Terence Rattigan. The Man Who Loved Redheads. 1954. Rattigan Papers: British Library. Add. MSS. 74345, p. 8.

  21. Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Emlyn Williams in Accolade (1950) also explore the ‘double life’ theme. It may not be coincidental that both playwrights were themselves bisexual. Williams’s play opened only a month or so before Rattigan’s, and the passing affinity of the two plays was noted by the critics.

  22. Darlow, op. cit., p. 257.

  23. When Rattigan completed a draft of the play, he read it aloud to his mother and father, who reportedly ‘laughed until the tears ran down their faces’ (ibid., p. 257), not the reaction that would have greeted a play continued in the vein of the first draft.

  24. Glen Byam Shaw. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 10 February 1950. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74346 A.

  25. Inadmissible Evidence by John Osborne uses the same device – three different characters played by the same actress – to emphasise the main character’s mental confusions. After seeing and reading the play in 1969, Rattigan wrote to Osborne ‘I have to tell you that I think it not only your fullest and most moving work, but the best play of the century’ (quoted in John Heilpern. John Osborne: A Patriot For Us. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006, p. 192). Intriguingly, too, Osborne’s 1964 play begins with the play’s anti-hero being forced to defend himself in a High Court of his own imagination. Earlier that year, Rattigan’s preface to the third volume of his Collected Plays is the playwright being cross-examined in a court filled, it seems, by his own characters, including Sir Robert Morton and Aunt Edna. The links between Osborne and Rattigan may be closer than generally acknowledged.

  26. Terence Rattigan. Letter to A.D. Peters. 5 February 1950. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74346 A.

  27. A.D. Peters. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 7 February 1950. Ibid.

  28. Terence Rattigan. Letter to A.D. Peters. 8 February 1950. Ibid.

  29. A.D. Peters. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 11 February 1950. Ibid.

  30. Terence Rattigan. Letter to Harold Freedman. 10 F
ebruary 1950. Ibid. Michael Darlow adds a third explanation for the cooling of their relationship. A former lover of Terry’s, John Montgomery, was now working for Peters and mentioned over dinner that he was friendly with Kenneth Morgan and his new lover, and that they had all socialised together. Rattigan appears to have considered this a betrayal, and Montgomery blames this for Rattigan distancing himself from Peters’ agency (Darlow op. cit.,

  31. Harold Freedman. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 9 February 1950. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74346 A.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Rex Harrison. Letter to Terence Rattigan. [Arrived] 14 February 1950. Ibid.

  34. Terence Rattigan. Letter to Rex Harrison. 15 February 1950. Ibid.

  35. Harold Freedman. Telegram to Terence Rattigan. 18 February 1950. Ibid. In the event, The King and I went ahead without Rex Harrison as the King, to, I would suggest, the lasting benefit of the show.

  36. Telegrams between Rex Harrison and Terence Rattigan. 4–9 March 1950. Ibid.

  37. Michael Wilding. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 8 May 1950. Ibid.

  38. John Mills. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 2 May 1950. Ibid.

  39. Tennents. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 28 April 1950. Ibid.

  40. Robert Flemyng. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 8 May 1950. Ibid.

  41. Athene Seyler. Telegram to Tennents. 5 July 1950. Ibid.

  42. Quoted in Tennents. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 29 May 1950. Ibid.

  43. Terence Rattigan. Telegram to Harold Freedman. 1 June 1950. Ibid.

  44. Quoted in John Barber. ‘Hyde and seek – with Terence Rattigan’. Daily Express. 25 October 1950.

  45. Juliet Duff. Letter to Terence Rattigan. 19 October 1950. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74346 A.