Theater Review: Terrence Rattigan’s ‘The Winslow Boy,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

When I heard that the Roundabout Theatre Company would be reviving The Winslow Boy, I was simultaneously thrilled at the prospect of seeing this worthy property again and fearful at how it would be received in the United States, 66 years after its original Broadway premiere.  Playwright Terence Rattigan, after being the toast of the theater world on both sides of the Atlantic, had been targeted by critics as stodgy after the mid-1950s, and had not fully recovered, even with a knighthood in hand, when he died two decades later.

I need not have feared. The play, which closed at the American Airlines Theatre at the start of the month after 85 performances, kicked off the company’s 2013-14 season in fine fashion. Its narrative line was far sturdier than the prior Rattigan productions from the Roundabout that I’ve seen, The Deep Blue Sea in 1998 (starring Blythe Danner) and Man and Boy in 2011 (starring Frank Langella).

I previously considered the playwright in a post on the centenary of his birth. I write in the belief that some of what I express might lead at least one reader to discover something new or even reconsider a long-held opinion. But really, it’s the value of shows such as this one that will make the crucial critical establishment and the audiences they influence look with fresh eyes at a figure wrongly dismissed as fussy and hidebound in a drawing-room way of life that looked like an increasing artifact following the kitchen-sink realism of John Osborne's 1956 drama, Look Back in Anger.

The first thing that director Lindsay Posner got right was, in fact, to accept, by and large, Rattigan’s Edwardian time frame. (One slight concession: Instead of 1908, when British readers first became transfixed by the real-life theft accusation that inspired the drama, the events have been moved back five years, to just before WWI, when the nation’s longtime faith in the government and military died in trenches on the Continent.) He did not make the mistake of the filmmakers behind the 1994 remake of Rattigan’s prep-school drama The Browning Version, who updated the plot for little reason and to no discernible positive effect.

Second, Posner accepted the theatrical tradition in which Rattigan operated—the “well-made play” that depends on tight plots and careful preparation of effects. It makes demands on attention-wandering modern audiences that might seem considerable, even extreme, with one principal character not even appearing onstage for the first hour. But that seemingly leisurely approach also brings with it rich subtleties in characterization that endures long after the curtain descends.

In a contemporary culture in which reality shows glory in their shamelessness, Rattigan’s consistent concern from play to play with the loss of reputation (he was homosexual at a time in Great Britain wehn it could lead to arrest) might seem old-fashioned. In fact, though, the obsessive quest of the father of The Winslow Boy—that his country’s legal system live up to his barrister’s urging, “Let right be done”--resonates as much with 21st century Americans as much as with Edwardian Englishmen.

The plot sounds simple enough: banker Arthur Winslow, a pillar of the community, fiercely proud of his family’s honor, battles in court his son Ronnie’s school, which had expelled the 13-year-old  for allegedly stealing a postal order from a fellow naval cadet. But what begins as a legal drama becomes onstage a family—and, implicitly, a social—one.

Complications ensue: Is Ronnie, in fact, innocent? (Initially, he hides in the family garden, wary of the wrath of his godlike, righteous father.) Why doesn’t Arthur accept the advice of his practical but warmhearted wife Grace: i.e., let Ronnie have a clean slate by letting him start over in another school where nobody need know about this scandal, rather than expose him to notoriety? Will carefree older son Dickie, forced to leave college because of mounting expenses for Ronnie’s defense, make a go of it in the business world? Should Arthur continue his defense, even after it raises the possibility of ending the engagement of daughter Catherine?

For the last four decades or so, the best chance to see how these questions were resolved came in the form of the 1948 and 1999 film adaptations directed by, respectively, Anthony Asquith and David Mamet. It was the achievement of London’s venerable Old Vic Theatre to remind people (including management at The Roundabout Theatre Co.) that it remained a sterling example of stagecraft, too.

The Roundabout made two key personnel decisions in deciding to import the Old Vic production of this vintage play. First, it retained Posner, who took a fresh approach to Rattigan’s exquisitely paced script, including bringing little-suspected ironic humor. Second, the effects of using American actors in many subsidiary roles were mitigated by the excellent dialect coach, Stephen Gabis.  

The principal British import—really, the marquee attraction—was Roger Rees, probably best-known to most of the American public for his recurring guest role as Robin Colcord on Cheers, but also a sterling actor also possessed of extensive stage experience (including the Roundabout’s 2000 production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, in which he played Dr. Astrov). This time, as Arthur Winslow, he powerfully played a family pillar whose deteriorating health makes him unexpectedly vulnerable.

The rest of the cast used to the hilt Rattigan’s wonderfully inhabited their roles, especially the following:

*Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio exhibited all the maternal warmth suggested by her character’s name, Grace, but also the strength needed to challenge her husband over what seems like a fruitless obsession.

*Michael Cumpsty bestows on solicitor Desmond Curry—a source of amusement to the family with his diffident, awkward manner—a special dignity as a loyalist who does not deserve them when so many others do.

*Charlotte Parry and Alessandro Nivola distinguish themselves as the feminist Catherine and the more traditional barrister retained by the family. Sir Robert Morton, whose relationship progresses from barely concealed hostility to considerable admiration—and, perhaps, more.

I should mention a slight pet peeve here. The Roundabout has an excellent set of theater enrichment programs, or “talk-back” sessions, in which audience members can learn more about the show. The performance I attended, however, was part of the “Celebrity Series,” a title that is more of a case of wishing than reality. Had Rees or even Ms. Mastrantonio appeared, it might have lived up to its name. But the actors who came out on stage, Nivola and Zachary Booth (who played Dickie), however talented they were, are hardly celebrities. Rattigan, who valued precise language and even understatement, would have found the hype distasteful.

Flashback, August 1956: “Prince” Party Marks Apex of Olivier, Rattigan

Terence Rattigan loved the good life, and he proceeded to celebrate it again with a grand soiree at his country estate in Sunnydale, England, close to where his screenplay for The Prince and the Showgirl was being filmed. Anyone seeing the host—not only the creator of hits on Broadway and the West End, but also reputedly the highest-paid screenwriter in the world—together with the male star of the movie, Laurence Olivier, could be forgiven for thinking they were on top of the world.

But already, both men sensed that, beneath the placid surface of their lives, dangers lurked, and that they would never have it so good again. Their problems involved two women—both connected to this particular film property—and an up-and-coming playwright-screenwriter.

Two Women--Both Trouble

One of the two women was Olivier’s wife, actress Vivien Leigh, who had originated the role of “the showgirl” in the original stage version of the film (then titled The Sleeping Prince). The play, Rattigan didn’t mind admitting, was a trifle, a confection whipped up the year that Elizabeth II was crowned queen, when the whole island was even more absorbed in all things royal than ever before.

British critics and audiences weren’t exactly wild about it, either, leading Rattigan’s good friend Noel Coward to offer some tongue-in-cheek consolation: ““Don’t worry, Terence. I not only f--- up some of my plays by writing them, but I frequently f--- them up by acting in them as well.”

Rattigan, then, was thrilled when this unlikely property drew interest from an even more unlikely source: Marilyn Monroe, whose ambition was to act in a film with Olivier.

At first, Olivier was thrilled about working with Monroe, too. Upon first meeting her, he wrote about how he would break the news to Leigh if he went ahead with his idle fantasy of an affair with the blonde bombshell. He thought she was sweet, enchanting. But not for long.

You have to love the accompanying photo of Monroe surrounded by Olivier and Leigh. First of all, it is so staged. You can tell that the three principals--all acutely aware of how they looked on camera--must have sensed how this shot would look like once it was snapped. But more important, as consummate actors, they’re expressing an affection for each other that they didn’t feel in life, except maybe fleetingly.

Within only a week or two, the actor-knight was fuming over the actress’ chronic tardiness, her inability to get through scenes quickly, and the excessive influence of her adviser Paula Strasberg, wife of Actors’ Studio coach Lee Strasberg. For her part, Monroe suspected—probably correctly—that her director-star wanted her in this role less for her acting skills than her proven box-office ability.

Soaking all this up, with some humor but also with an insecurity to match Monroe’s own, was Leigh. It would have been out of the question for the Oscar-winning star of Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire to repeat her stage performance on screen. While the fortysomething Leigh could have gotten away with being a showgirl onstage, the big screen, with its often giant, pitiless closeups, would have exposed the evidence of the years starting to show on her still-beautiful face.

Early in the filming, then, when Leigh inquired of Olivier’s assistant Colin Clark how the movie was progressing, she smiled, with a touch of minx, when he told her that it really wasn’t going well at all.

Olivier must not have believed his horrible fortune. If he had thought he was getting a respite from one mentally unstable woman--his wife (more on this in a minute)--he was badly mistaken. A quarter-century later, in his memoir Confessions of an Actor, he acknowledged that, when all was said and done, Monroe had given “a star performance,” observing particularly that “no one had such a look of hurt innocence or of unconscious wisdom.”

Middle-Aged Angst

Even that recollection, however, was tinged with lingering difficult memories of the filming, as well as what was occurring in his personal life. “I was fifty. What a happy memory it would have been if Marilyn had made me feel twenty years younger--but I was upset by her insolence, which showed my age, I suppose….Maybe I was tetchy with Marilyn and with myself, because my career was in a rut.”

Even though Monroe, like Olivier, showed up at Rattigan’s party, the soiree gave the director a few hours to forget about his middle-aged angst. Rattigan, too, was able to forget momentarily the sense that his own career and life had slipped out of gear and he might not be able to get back on track.

Ever since the spring, when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had electrified the London theater world, Rattigan had worriedly taken in the critical hosannas that erupted over this drama of working-class alienation and towering fury, realizing that his own brand of theater--in which somewhat more genteel characters struggle against misfortune and shame with barely repressed despair--was no longer in favor. He feared, with reason, that his heyday was over.

Coward, a mutual friend of Rattigan and the Oliviers, felt the same fears about his future place in the British theater that afflicted his playwright confidante. But at least in early summer, Coward thought he could stave off public disaffection for awhile with a box-office success: Ms. Leigh in his new play, South Sea Bubble.

“Filled With Forebodings”

Coward’s confidence evaporated when Leigh announced to the press on July 12 that she was expecting a child by Christmas. While cabling his congratulations to her and Olivier, the playwright confided to his diary his considerable annoyance about replacing his star --and his enormously perceptive take on what the pregnancy might mean for her:

“I also think, from Vivien’s point of view, that it is a highly perilous enterprise. If anything goes wrong it will very possibly send her around the bend again; she is over forty, very, very small, and none too well balanced mentally. I am filled with forebodings and a curious sense of having been let down.”

Coward was right to feel unease. He had been privy to much of the couple’s agony earlier in the decade, as, during a U.S. appearance in the “two Cleos” (Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra), Leigh began to show stronger and more frequent symptoms of manic depression. A further strain had developed between husband and wife over her affair with co-star Peter Finch on the set of the 1954 film Elephant Walk. Her nervous breakdown on location required that she be replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.

At this point, another consideration comes into play: Was Leigh really pregnant? The possibility that she might not have been was raised by Donald Spoto in his 1992 biography of Olivier:

“Still slim, no one could have guessed that she was four months pregnant, and no medical records confirming her testimony have been uncovered. In view of Marilyn Monroe’s imminent arrival and assumption of Vivien’s role, there was widespread speculation that the pregnancy was a deception designed by Vivien to maintain a hold on Olivier’s attention.”

But Spoto’s footnotes on this reveal no sources about any of this. In contrast, in his biography of Olivier, Terry Coleman includes the testimony of Olivier’s sister-in-law Hester Ives St. John, who vividly recalled the devastating denouement: a middle-of-the-night call from Leigh’s GP to a gynecologist, who, after examining the star, said: “I’m sorry, we couldn’t save it. It was a girl.”

Curtains on One Marriage and Three Lives

Leigh was devastated by the miscarriage. By Christmastime, instead of celebrating the birth of the first child of their 16-year union, she and Olivier were quarreling. Matters worsened during Olivier’s appearance in Osborne’s The Entertainer, when the actor, already so worn by his demanding role as has-been vaudevillian Archie Rice that he needed rejuvenation injections, was subjected to humiliating fights in front of cast and crew by Leigh.

By 1958, after Olivier had begun an affair with Joan Plowright, who played his daughter in Osborne’s drama, the marriage of Britain’s most famous theatrical couple existed in name only.

Olivier divorced Leigh and married Plowright in 1960. Marriage to the younger woman gave him the stability and family he couldn’t have with Leigh. As for Leigh, though she embarked on a new long-term relationship, she continued to think of herself as Lady Olivier.

When Leigh died in London in 1967 from tuberculosis, Olivier, notified of her death, discharged himself from the hospital where he had been recuperating from surgery for prostate cancer, entered her flat through a side door to avoid the waiting press, then stood alone at her bedside, praying for forgiveness, he later wrote, “for all the evils that sprung up between us.”

As for Rattigan, he was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar for adapting his own Separate Tables in 1958, but otherwise he fell into the irrelevance that he feared would come to pass. For 10 years, it has been said, he couldn’t enter his favorite London club because he couldn’t bear the awkwardness shown by other members over his lack of a West End hit.

As I wrote earlier this year, it was only shortly before his death in 1977 that the tide began to shift somewhat in Rattigan’s favor--and a more sustained comeback is occurring this year, in the centennial of his birth.

A Story Retold on Screen

Later this year, the months of anticipation and agony surrounding The Prince and the Showgirl will be reenacted onscreen in My Week With Marilyn, a biopic based on a memoir by Colin Clark.
The new movie by Simon Curtis, which will premiere in another month at the New York Film Festival, contains a cast that looks well-matched to its real-life originals. Michelle Williams, though more petite than Monroe, seems very capable of capturing her vulnerability. Playing what might be her most interesting role in years--Vivien Leigh--will be Julia Ormond.

But the closest match of star to subject in the film might be Kenneth Branagh as Olivier. Like Olivier, Branagh is an actor-director who won considerable acclaim on stage and screen for his adaptations of Shakespeare, later fell into something of a middle-aged funk, and was once considered, with former wife Emma Thompson, as a successor to Olivier and Leigh as Britain’s royal thespian couple. He is, then, extremely knowledgeable about the stresses placed on career and marriage by enormous fame.

Oddly enough, I don't see among the cast members anyone who will be playing Rattigan. In one way, though, I'm not surprised. As William Holden's sardonic screenwriter-gigolo, Joe Gillis, noted acidly in Sunset Boulevard: "Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."

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.