This Day in Theater History (Birth of Terence Rattigan, Knight of the “Well-Made Play“)

June 10, 1911—Terence Rattigan, whose mastery of the “well-made play” led to knighthood and made him a case study in fickle critical favor, was born in London to a line of distinguished Anglo-Irish lawyers, diplomats and imperial administrators--a group that followed norms that, if broken, had grave consequences for their future.

Gay rights and posthumous revelations about the playwright’s private life have led a number of observers to associate the obsessions in Rattigan’s work--repression, shame and failure--with his need to remain in the closet at a time when homosexuality was still illegal under British law.

While Rattigan did treat his sexuality through parallelism and indirection, it is also true that he became familiar with the implications of breaking social rules even earlier than his realization of his sexual orientation.

At age 11, Rattigan’s life was shaken to its foundations when his father Frank was forced out of a diplomatic post over his handling of a crisis in the Balkans. Left with only a small government pension, Frank suffered a midlife crisis, taking to drinking and extramarital affairs--and exposing his son to gossip at school about his parent. Childhood shame leaves a stinging brand in many writers (e.g., Dickens, Frank McCourt) that it often takes a lifetime--and a life's work--to deal with, and so it was here, I think, with Rattigan.

I have wanted to write about Rattigan for awhile. This post represents a particularly apropos time to do so, for three reasons:

1) it’s the centennial of his birth;
2) this year marks the 60th anniversary of the classic film adaptation of one of his finest works, The Browning Version;
3) June is not simply the end of the school year but, for many teachers, the end of their careers in education—a moment that for many in the field (including the protagonist of the The Browning Version) represents bitter regret over the death of their greatest hopes.

The 1956 London premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger did more than signal the advent of the so-called “angry young man” movement in British theater, film and fiction. With its fierce class consciousness, its bile, and its disdain for proper “form” (dramatic and otherwise), it also represented an all-out assault on an entire tradition of theater to which Rattigan belonged: the “well-made play.“

Once an indication of solid craftsmanship, the “well-made play” has now become, in certain quarters, a snobbish dismissal of certain works as old-fashioned. In this view, adherence to the Aristotelian classical tragic unities of time, setting and action led to a kind of hopeless stodginess.

Rattigan in particular became a sitting target for criticism. He had almost invited it, after all, with an ill-advised 1950 essay in The New Statesman on “the play of ideas.” Being bound to “themes of urgent topicality,” in the manner of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, he insisted, was creatively injurious. “The trouble with the theatre today,” he concluded, “is not that so few writers refuse to look the facts of the present world in the face but that so many refuse to look at anything else.”

Had he been wiser, Rattigan might have inoculated himself against criticism by acknowledging that his own plays were very much taken with “the theater of ideas”: in his case, what happens to people who step outside commonly accepted social boundaries:

*In The Deep Blue Sea, a drama that originally starred Margaret Sullivan on Broadway and was revived by the Roundabout Theatre Co. in 1998 with the equally wondrous Blythe Danner, Rattigan considered how a woman just over a suicide attempt tries to cope with her wayward lover and the loss of her marriage. A subplot features a former doctor struck off the medical register for an unspecified shameful offense (perhaps performing an abortion?), now reduced to a bookmaker's clerk.

* In The Winslow Boy, a well-to-do British family see their financial status threatened once the father attempts to prove that his teenaged son was innocent of the charge of petty theft at his naval college.

* In Separate Tables, a supposedly retired British major is exposed as a fraud when a past secret--his arrest for exposing himself in a theater--is revealed.

* And in The Browning Version, a chilly martinet of a classics teacher at a prep school, disliked by his adulterous wife, colleagues and students, is forced into a bitter reconsideration of his life when he is compelled by a bad heart and his unsympathetic headmaster into early retirement.

For all its heartfelt moments, Mike Figgis' 1994 cinematic revival of the latter doesn't measure up to Anthony Asquith's 1951 original, which had Michael Redgrave in one of the highlights of his career as the despised Andrew Crocker-Harris. It's too bad, because one of Rattigan's themes here--about the frequent thanklessness of a profession that, for all its idealism, produces so many burnt-out cases--remains timeless.

In certain ways, Rattigan resembles another playwright “across the pond” from him, the American William Inge, only two years his junior. Both were gay; both reigned supreme at theater box-offices at midcentury; both wrote screenplays, with widely varying results (Rattigan superb, in adaptations by Anthony Asquith of Winslow and Browning; subpar, in Asquith's work on Rattigan's original screenplay, The V.I.P.'s; Inge superb, in Splendor in the Grass, subpar in Bus Riley's Back in Town); and both were in such critical disfavor that their personal lives derailed into heavy drinking, depression and, in Rattigan's case, exile from Britain.

But here, matters diverged. By the time Inge was committed suicide in 1973, he was no longer mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as the greatest living American playwrights, and, despite the occasional revival (Come Back, Little Sheba, a few years ago, on Broadway), his reputation has still not recovered.

On the other hand, Rattigan rallied long enough to see at least a partial re-evaluation of his work. His knighthood in 1971--a nice 60th birthday present--occurred at the same time that the fortunes of his nemesis, Osborne, began to slide. He could still rail in annoyance that "the whole Royal Court thing" (the acclaim for Look Back in Anger) had upended the fortunes of him, Noel Coward and J.B. Priestley, but he was still working, and, even as his health declined precipitously, managed to finish another play, Cause Celebre, before his death in 1977.

(Incidentally, if you ever have a chance to rent it, watch a 1987 PBS adaptation of the latter--starring Helen Mirren, as a married woman whose affair with a young handyman leads the latter, in a jealous rage, to kill her husband.)

And now, in the year of his centenary, Rattigan is being accorded what Dominic Cavendish, in a story in the U.K.'s Telegraph, calls "pointed and unapologetic veneration." The playwright's native land is seeing productions this year of Less Than Kind, The Deep Blue Sea, and Cause Celebre. Closer to home, the Roundabout is mounting Man and Boy, Rattigan's 1963 drama about a business tycoon whose dishonor upends the life of his son.

Undoubtedly, the Roundabout saw echoes of the Bernie Madoff scandal in this long-neglected play. Yet I don't think the mature Rattigan could have written it without understanding, from his own bitter, long-ago experience with his father, how the son in his play felt.

By including a Rattigan play in the same season as Look Back in Anger, the Roundabout is implicitly suggesting that the British theater tradition has ample room for both Rattigan and Osborne. Let's hope that contemporary critics realize what hat their forebears of a half-century ago missed: that Rattigan's work is filled with the subtlety, understatement and restraint that actors crave.