In too deep: Maxine Peake plays Rattigan heroine Hester at the West Yorkshire Playhouse
The Deep Blue Sea, West Yorkshire Playhouse, until 12th March, Tel: 0113 213 7700
Flare Path, Theatre Royal Haymarket, 4th March-4th June, Tel: 0845 481 1870
Cause Célèbre, The Old Vic, 17th March-11th June, Tel: 0844 871 7628
Nostalgia is not always what it’s cracked up to be. Armed with the centenary of a critically disregarded artist, producers rush out revivals and special editions which burn brightly but fade back into obscurity as everyone realises 100 is only a number and that the work was probably justly neglected. If this is the rule, this year’s commemoration of Terence Rattigan, who was born in 1911, will be the exception.
By the time of his death in 1977, Rattigan was so out of fashion that he was regarded as a throwback. In the 1950s—when theatre had far more impact on the cultural barometer than it has now—tastes changed with the class and generational shifts heralded by the likes of Look Back In Anger. From John Osborne and Arnold Wesker to Bond, Brenton and beyond, theatre had become politicised, critical and urgent. Rattigan represented everything the Angry Young Men were determined to sweep aside. Who but the conservative elderly, they argued, needed plays by a rich, knighted, closeted gay man whose characters stood by the French windows and lived by the drinks trolley?
That collapse in his reputation was all the more profound considering how great his success had been. Rattigan made his west end debut aged 25 with the spry comedy French Without Tears, starring Rex Harrison. It ran for almost three years and became a Broadway hit. The royalties made him very wealthy and in 1942 he doubled those earnings selling the film rights of his latest work, Flare Path, to 20th Century Fox. “It’s a masterpiece of understatement,” Winston Churchill told the Flare Path cast after one performance. “But we’re rather good at that, aren’t we?”
Rattigan was. That hallmark shone through four years later in The Winslow Boy, his most famous play, which delivered a shock. No one had expected him to write an anti-establishment drama of idealism versus authority. That too was a hit and there was more to come, including his finest works The Browning Version (1948) and The Deep Blue Sea (1952). As he observed in his 1953 introduction to the first volume of his Collected Plays, “It was generally felt to be very strange that a notoriously insincere farceur could so readily turn his hand to matters of fairly serious theatrical moment… I was myself conscious neither of the virtue nor the vice, but for all that basked happily, if with a few pangs of conscience, in the sun of the critics’ praise.”
That the tide turned with a vengeance was not solely to do with the cultural shift. Rattigan himself made matters worse, writing lengthy articles inveighing against critical taste. His biographers have claimed that these were, to a degree, tongue-in-cheek. They were certainly ill-advised and coincided with his own artistic slump. Marilyn Monroe bought the rights to Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince and starred opposite Laurence Olivier in the film, The Prince and The Showgirl, but it was far from being anyone’s finest hour.
Yet the vexed production of that movie is being revisited in the forthcoming film My Week With Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams as Monroe and Kenneth Branagh as Olivier. And British filmmaker Terence Davies has made The Deep Blue Sea, to be released later this year. Rachel Weisz plays middle-class Hester, who leaves her considerate husband (Simon Russell Beale) when she discovers sex, albeit with a man who doesn’t love her.
Rattigan’s naysayers failed to notice that the idea of sex—the need for it, the demands it makes, the havoc it can wreak—is central to his plays. Yet in his work and life, its open representation had to be suppressed: anti-gay censorship was rigorously enforced by the Lord Chamberlain and, during the mid-1950s, over 2,000 men were arrested every year for homosexual offences. That gives an edge to a line like “Do you think it wise to make your feelings for the Major quite so public?” as Mrs Railton-Bell upbraids her daughter in Separate Tables.
It would be far too simplistic to argue that his female characters are gay men in disguise—they’re too well-written for that—but his rare degree of empathy with characters forced to repress their feelings produces extraordinary tension. He is the master of crafted understatement, a technique that rewards audiences who become engrossed by reading between the lines. Drama in the second half of the 20th century was all about being explicit. The Rattigan centenary—with revivals of the key plays across the country—looks set to prove the enduring power of the implicit.
The Deep Blue Sea, West Yorkshire Playhouse, until 12th March, Tel: 0113 213 7700
Flare Path, Theatre Royal Haymarket, 4th March-4th June, Tel: 0845 481 1870
Cause Célèbre, The Old Vic, 17th March-11th June, Tel: 0844 871 7628
Nostalgia is not always what it’s cracked up to be. Armed with the centenary of a critically disregarded artist, producers rush out revivals and special editions which burn brightly but fade back into obscurity as everyone realises 100 is only a number and that the work was probably justly neglected. If this is the rule, this year’s commemoration of Terence Rattigan, who was born in 1911, will be the exception.
By the time of his death in 1977, Rattigan was so out of fashion that he was regarded as a throwback. In the 1950s—when theatre had far more impact on the cultural barometer than it has now—tastes changed with the class and generational shifts heralded by the likes of Look Back In Anger. From John Osborne and Arnold Wesker to Bond, Brenton and beyond, theatre had become politicised, critical and urgent. Rattigan represented everything the Angry Young Men were determined to sweep aside. Who but the conservative elderly, they argued, needed plays by a rich, knighted, closeted gay man whose characters stood by the French windows and lived by the drinks trolley?
That collapse in his reputation was all the more profound considering how great his success had been. Rattigan made his west end debut aged 25 with the spry comedy French Without Tears, starring Rex Harrison. It ran for almost three years and became a Broadway hit. The royalties made him very wealthy and in 1942 he doubled those earnings selling the film rights of his latest work, Flare Path, to 20th Century Fox. “It’s a masterpiece of understatement,” Winston Churchill told the Flare Path cast after one performance. “But we’re rather good at that, aren’t we?”
Rattigan was. That hallmark shone through four years later in The Winslow Boy, his most famous play, which delivered a shock. No one had expected him to write an anti-establishment drama of idealism versus authority. That too was a hit and there was more to come, including his finest works The Browning Version (1948) and The Deep Blue Sea (1952). As he observed in his 1953 introduction to the first volume of his Collected Plays, “It was generally felt to be very strange that a notoriously insincere farceur could so readily turn his hand to matters of fairly serious theatrical moment… I was myself conscious neither of the virtue nor the vice, but for all that basked happily, if with a few pangs of conscience, in the sun of the critics’ praise.”
That the tide turned with a vengeance was not solely to do with the cultural shift. Rattigan himself made matters worse, writing lengthy articles inveighing against critical taste. His biographers have claimed that these were, to a degree, tongue-in-cheek. They were certainly ill-advised and coincided with his own artistic slump. Marilyn Monroe bought the rights to Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince and starred opposite Laurence Olivier in the film, The Prince and The Showgirl, but it was far from being anyone’s finest hour.
Yet the vexed production of that movie is being revisited in the forthcoming film My Week With Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams as Monroe and Kenneth Branagh as Olivier. And British filmmaker Terence Davies has made The Deep Blue Sea, to be released later this year. Rachel Weisz plays middle-class Hester, who leaves her considerate husband (Simon Russell Beale) when she discovers sex, albeit with a man who doesn’t love her.
Rattigan’s naysayers failed to notice that the idea of sex—the need for it, the demands it makes, the havoc it can wreak—is central to his plays. Yet in his work and life, its open representation had to be suppressed: anti-gay censorship was rigorously enforced by the Lord Chamberlain and, during the mid-1950s, over 2,000 men were arrested every year for homosexual offences. That gives an edge to a line like “Do you think it wise to make your feelings for the Major quite so public?” as Mrs Railton-Bell upbraids her daughter in Separate Tables.
It would be far too simplistic to argue that his female characters are gay men in disguise—they’re too well-written for that—but his rare degree of empathy with characters forced to repress their feelings produces extraordinary tension. He is the master of crafted understatement, a technique that rewards audiences who become engrossed by reading between the lines. Drama in the second half of the 20th century was all about being explicit. The Rattigan centenary—with revivals of the key plays across the country—looks set to prove the enduring power of the implicit.
