Reading List

Since I've been trying to watch (or listen to) all of the Rattigans lately, this seems like a good topic for a post!

Who was Rattigan?

Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) was an English playwright and screenwriter, whose most famous works are The Browning Version (1948), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) & Separate Tables (1954). His works are usually sharply observed, low-key character pieces, mostly v middle-class background*, one of a combination of factors that caused him to fall from favour in the wake of Osborne's Look Back in Anger in the 50s. He wrote for (low-brow!) cinema, radio and TV too, another factor. Since the 90s in particular he's been recognised as one of the 20th C greats, via several major revivals of many of his works and you'd be hard pressed to find a year now when some major British theatre or other isn't putting on a Rattigan.

He was gay, which is evident in many of his plays, although usually more implicitly than explicitly - the most explicit use of a gay character, in Separate Tables, he censored himself prior to its Broadway performance. From 1998, though, happily, modern productions have usually restored the original version. The Browning Version isn't explicit, but is very much about queerness, too.

I came across him when my teacher gave us The Browning Version for A-Level, and instantly fell in love, even if it took me thirty-odd years to finally get up and try some of the rest of his plays. I think I was worried that they wouldn't be as good or would contain aspects that might spoil TBV for me - happily, as you can see, I needn't have worried!


What do I love about his works?

He's very much all about character pieces, especially small-scale, claustrophobic ones (which the theatre naturally tends towards), in a way that I really love.

His first success was the farce French Without Tears (1936), so between that and the screen-writing, he's a very easy watch, in the best sense - his dialogue says so much about character, and often still feels fresh, and he can do light comedy as well as the more serious pieces. You'll often find variations on mismatched marriages, moral choices, people from different positions finding understanding of each other, and trial by the media in one form or another. His characterisation is always well-rounded and complex.

The thing I love the most, though, is his characteristic trick of having so much of the mood or conclusion or character shift on a literal sixpence - one small item, or action, or change of point of view leads to an uplift of hope we didn't expect - and on rare occasions, the reverse, acting as the last spiteful straw. The gift of a book, the discovery of a letter, love of art - how big small things can be to us humans.

I'll talk about specific plays if I carry on with this meme, I'm sure, but I definitely think he's worth trying out if you haven't already. There are a range of adaptations around, new and old, (TV, film, Radio, some of which he wrote the screenplays for himself), as well as current theatre productions.

The National Theatre has a really nice little two-part intro to five of his major works (spoilery, though, as ever with these things) - I presume this means they have some Rattigans on their At Home service, too. If you wanted to try a live production, The Winslow Boy or The Browning Version are particularly good starting places.

(Warnings - not many! He's not a bleak writer at all as a rule, but suicide does crop up in various ways in After the Dance, The Deep Blue Sea, Cause Celebre, and Man and Boy; and In Praise of Love has a character with a terminal illness - leukaemia, which he had himself).

The last thing of his I watched was Heart to Heart, a 1962 BBC TV screenplay written to launch one of their anthologies - it deals again with mismatched marriages, trial by the media, and an attempt to do the right thing that isn't very successful, but at the end, the main character, learning that out of nearly 300 people who phoned into the TV station after a broadcast, 3 of them got the point: "That's something," he says. "They must be very interesting people."

How very Rattigan. ♥



* He attended Harrow, although wiki, if it is to be believed, says that while he was there, he was in its Officer Training Course and started a mutiny, which is brilliant if it's true. <3