Terence Rattigan

(1911–1977)

The Deep Blue Sea by Terence Rattigan

Theatr Clwyd, 1996

The Well-Made Playwright

Terence Rattigan was born on 10 June 1911, the son of a diplomat. Although he was expected to follow his father into the service, after winning scholarships to Harrow and going up to Trinity College, Oxford to read history, Rattigan avoided the mistake of working: he was already determined on his chosen career and had no desire to be “marked out for life by getting a degree”. He devoted his time instead to the theatre, first as drama critic on the student paper Cherwell, and also, briefly, as a very bad actor. He had a single line in John Gielgud’s production of Romeo and Juliet – “Faith, we may put up our pipes and be gone” – and no matter how he altered the inflection, it was never greeted with anything less than a storm of laughter. It was a traumatic experience which he would later use to comic effect tin Harlequinade.

First Episode, written in collaboration with fellow undergraduate Philip Heimann, was produced at the Comedy Theatre, London in 1934 and appeared in New York later that year. It was encouragement enough. Rattigan left university without taking his degree and his family agreed to give him an allowance of £200 a year for two years on condition that if he had not established himself within that time, he would enter whatever profession his father deemed fit. In the event he barely squeaked under the wire. French Without Tears opened at the Criterion

Theatre in November 1936 and subsequently ran for over a thousand performances. In 1939 it became the first of his plays to be filmed, in a collaboration with Anatole de Grunwald with whom Rattigan formed a long and fruitful partnership.

The Playwright Arrives

On the proceeds of this early and phenomenal success, Rattigan instigated the champagne lifestyle that was to become his hallmark: rooms at The Albany, fashionable friends, and frequent mentions in the gossip columns. But by the time the war started he had become increasingly worried at his inability to come up with a worthy successor to that first glittering hit. “The poorhouses are full of people who have written one successful play,” his mother had warned him. In despair he consulted a psychiatrist, Dr Keith Newman, who briskly advised him to join the RAF. It might seem a paradoxical course of action for someone who had, in his youth, been an avowed pacifist, but in Rattigan’s case it proved a wise move. He enlisted in May 1940, was posted air-gunner/wireless operator to Coastal Command, and was later promoted to flight lieutenant.

Flare Path, a stirring wartime flag-waver, was completed piecemeal between missions and opened in London in August 1942 for an unbroken run of nearly two years. It was the turning point in his creative life. From that point on, he produced a play or a film script almost every year until his sixties.

Material from Flare Path was used in the film The Way to the Stars in 1945 and among his other works for the cinema were Brighton Rock with Graham Greene, The Sound Barrier, The VIPs and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. But Rattigan’s reputation rests mainly on the stage plays among which The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables are considered the best.

Aunt Edna versus the Critics

By the time the war ended Rattigan was both phenomenally successful and wealthy – ‘Play-as-you-earn Rattigan’ quipped the Daily Express – and he took pride and pleasure in both. Then in the mid-fifties Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court ushering onto the British stage a new spirit of restlessness.

“There I was in 1956,” Rattigan wrote later, “a reasonably successful playwriter… and suddenly the whole Royal Court thing exploded and Coward and Priestley and I were all dismissed. Sacked by the critics…” Rattigan was labelled old-fashioned and old hat, his plays dismissed as reactionary, middle of the road, ‘safe’. In a sense he had made the critics a gift of a stick to beat him with in the matronly shape of Aunt Edna, a comic character based on his own mother who had acted as a kind of mouthpiece for the playwright in the preface to Volume Two of his collected plays published shortly before Separate Tables opened. Aunt Edna, in brief, knew what she liked and if it happened not to be trendy or fashionable, that was no concern of hers. “She makes only two demands of the theatre,” Rattigan claimed on her behalf, “first that it excites her to laugh or to cry or to wonder what is going to happen next, and second that she can suspend her disbelief willingly and without effort… Her greatest joy is still and always will be for a good strong meaty plot told by good strong meaty characters.”

It was the critics – rather than the playwrights they were championing – who were campaigning most vigorously for a break from old tradition to new wave. Rattigan was, and remained, one of the theatre professionals who continued to care only about the quality of the product. In later years he confused those critics by reacting positively to Joe Orton, and further confounded them by suggesting John Osborne and Harold Pinter were “superb craftsmen, both writers of exceptionally well-made plays. They’d be annoyed if anyone suggested otherwise.”

The fact was that Terence Rattigan the man – urbane, generous, perfect model of the upper-class English gentleman – was not at all the same person as Terence Rattigan the playwright, in whose works fellow playwright David Rudkin detected “a deep personal, surely sexual pain which he manages at the same time to express and disguise.” The major Rattigan characters all display some element of this psychic pain, having to live with a reality which may be at odds with their inner natures. Rattigan’s own homosexuality, which he needed to keep under wraps, involved him in a lifelong suppression of certain emotions which could only find true expression through his work. “Existential bleakness and carnal solitude” is how Rudkin diagnosed the syndrome. “He’s quite right of course,” Rattigan replied, “but I never thought my slip showed as much as that…”

“I still believe that the best plays are about people, not about things.”

In the last two decades of his life, Rattigan relied more on Hollywood than the West End for his bread and butter – or in his case, toast and caviar. Not that his relations with the American producers were always easy. In the early seventies, adapting his play A Bequest to the Nation on the life of Nelson for the movies, he was plunged into despair on being told he had to rewrite the screenplay eliminating the character of Horatio. “How am I expected to write a script about Horatio Nelson without him in it?” he complained to a friend. As it happened, things weren’t quite as bad as he feared: there was a minor character with two lines who also happened to be called Horatio, and he was the one the producer was referring to.

Rattigan died slowly of cancer over the last few years of his life, with unfailing dignity and courage. His final play, Cause Célèbre, was, like The Winslow Boy, based on a real-life court case and had its premiere in London in July 1977.

Terence Rattigan died on 30 November that year in Bermuda. On 9 February the following year, a memorial service was held at St Martin in the Fields. William Douglas Home wrote the address which ended with these words: “It is by [his] works – let us remember – and not by the memory of having known and loved him, that posterity will judge him. And that judgement I submit without much fear of contradiction will be that gentleness, inherent in his character, enabled him to write his plays without flamboyance or vulgarity but with, instead, compassion and integrity and humour and a wealth of understanding which ensured that, in no single one of them, was any line penned that in any way diminishes the dignity of man – rather, enhances it.”