Terence Rattigan
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Terence Rattigan â€" British Playwright |
Sir
Terence Mervyn Rattigan (
June 10 1911 â€"
November 30 1977) was one of
England's most important
20th century dramatists. He was born in
London, England of Irish Protestant extraction and educated at
Harrow and
Trinity College, Oxford, and his work to some extent reflects this privileged and intellectual background.
Success as a playwright came early, with the light comedy
French Without Tears in
1936, set in a
crammer. Rattigan's determination to write a more serious play produced
After the Dance 1939, a fine satirical social drama about the '
Bright Young Things' and their failure to do anything to prevent the war. Unfortunately the war itself scuppered the play's chances of a long run. Rattigan would alternate between comedies and dramas, and after the war, a string of dramas made his name as one of the major playwrights of the day:
The Winslow Boy (1946),
The Browning Version (1948),
The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and
Separate Tables (1954).
Rattigan believed in craftsmanship, structure, and his plays find their emotions in the depths. This all became very old-fashioned after 1956 when John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger announced a new kind of emotional explicitness and intensity. Rattigan, like many other writers of his generation, suffered an almost immediate eclipse, falling into critical disfavour. Rattigan was not a thick-skinned writer and the decline in his reputation hit at his confidence. He retaliated in churlish interviews, and ill-advised comments in the plays, and in doing so he turned himself into the caricature that was being made of him: a conservative, old-fashioned, play-carpenter with no sympathy or understanding of the modern world. In fact, he was none of these things, he publicly supported
Joe Orton and the
Liberal Party, and some of the better work of the last twenty years of his life, like
Ross,
Man and Boy,
In Praise of Love, and
Cause Célèbre, which stand up with the finest of his other work.
He was
homosexual, with a string of lovers but no long-term partners. It has been said that most of his work is autobiographical, containing many coded references to his sexuality and the issues it raised in a society in which he was forced to keep this part of himself secret from all but the closest friends.
He was diagnosed as having
leukemia in
1962 and recovered two years later, but again fell ill in
1968. He disliked the
Swinging Britain of the
1960s and moved abroad, living for the rest of the sixties in
Bermuda, and living off lucrative, but forgettable screenplays (for a time he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world). He was knighted in the early seventies and moved back to Britain where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death from
bone cancer in 1977 at the age of 66.
Fifteen years after his death, largely through a magnificent revival of
The Deep Blue Sea, at the
Almeida Theatre, London, directed by
Karel Reisz, Rattigan came to be seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of staged emotion, an anatomist of human emotional pain.
In 2005,
Man and Boy was revived at the Duchess Theatre, London, with
David Suchet as
Gregor Antonescu. The UK's
Chichester Festival Theatre revived his last play
In Praise Of Love as part of its 2006 summer season.
Several of his later plays were adapted for film and/or television. The best-known are:
The Winslow Boy (
1948 and
1999)
The Browning Version (film:
1948 and
1994; TV:
1955 and
1985)
Harlequinade (
1948)
The Deep Blue Sea (
1952)
Separate Tables (
1954)
Ross (
1960)
Rattigan lived briefly at The Red House in the
Berkshire village of
Sonning during 1945â€"47 and there is a
blue plaque recording his stay there, visible from the road.
*
*
Performances of Terence Rattigan's plays listed in University of Bristol Archive*
Terence Rattigan
