Terence Rattigan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terence Rattigan — British Playwright

Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan (June 10, 1911 – 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.

[edit] Life and career

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.

His play on the last days of Nelson, A Bequest to the Nation was revived on Radio 4 for Trafalgar 200. It starred Janet McTeer as Lady Hamilton, Kenneth Branagh as Nelson, and Amanda Root as Lady Nelson.

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 1945–47 and there is a blue plaque recording his stay there, visible from the road.