By Fredric Dannen
Few writers have fallen so spectacularly out of fashion in their own lifetimes as Terence Rattigan, the British playwright, born in South Kensington on June 10, 1911, a few days after the coronation of George V. A failed actor—he had one line to speak in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” and flubbed it—Rattigan tried his hand at playwriting instead. In 1936, after a few false starts, he penned “French Without Tears,” a comedy about a “cram school” for adults needing to learn basic French to use in business. It ran for over 1,000 performances and made a star of its leading man, Rex Harrison. Success followed success, and by 1946, Rattigan had three plays running simultaneously in London’s West End.
After WWII, during which Rattigan served as a tail gunner in the Royal Air Force, he wrote his three finest plays: “The Winslow Boy” (1946), about a father’s crusade to exonerate his son, expelled from a naval school after being wrongly accused of stealing a postal order; “The Browning Version” (1948), in which an emotionally repressed classics teacher struggles to hold on to his last shreds of dignity; and “The Deep Blue Sea” (1952), concerning a woman’s shaky recovery from a suicidal urge caused by her loving a man who cannot requite her feelings.
Then, virtually overnight, Rattigan’s reputation evaporated.
On the evening of May 8, 1956, John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger” opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London. An emotionally raw depiction of working-class Britons, the play seemed in every way a repudiation of the upper-middle-class, drawing-room theater of Rattigan, with its supposedly stodgy, Edwardian values. Osborne’s hit play popularized the terms “angry young man” and “kitchen sink drama,” the cultural movement in the theater that put a premium on social realism and generally depicted the lives of poor, struggling people. Rattigan glumly attended the opening night of “Look Back in Anger” and summed up his feelings with a bitter appraisal: “Why didn’t he simply call it ‘Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I am.’”
He was right, and with every passing year, Rattigan seemed more and more a relic. The low point may have come in 1959 when young British playwright Shelagh Delaney scored a success with “A Taste of Honey,” a kitchen sink play about a seventeen-year-old working-class girl living in a shabby flat with her alcoholic mother. Delaney pointedly said she was inspired to write her play after seeing, and disdaining, a play by Rattigan.
Rattigan succumbed to bone cancer in 1977, and although by then his work was beginning to make a comeback, he must have died believing his moment had come and gone.
Time is the ultimate arbiter, however. Today, the plays of many of Rattigan’s detractors seem like relics, while his best dramas have proven ageless.
I recently took a subscription to the National Theatre at Home, a streaming service that bills itself as “the best of British theatre.” Among the productions I saw were a 2014 revival of “A Taste of Honey,” starring Lesley Sharp as the mother, and a 2016 revival of “The Deep Blue Sea,” with Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer, the protagonist. Both productions were first-rate. I found much to admire in Delaney’s play, but I have never shaken off the impression I had when I read “A Taste of Honey” in college: that its structural flaws are too readily forgiven because Delaney was in her late teens when she wrote it. By contrast, I found Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” devastating. Hester Collyer’s journey from self-hatred to self-acceptance is dramatized with economy and force. It is surely one of the greatest female roles in the modern theater.
Meanwhile, “Look Back in Anger” has aged poorly. In 2013, London Telegraph theater critic Sarah Crompton dismissed Osborne’s play as a “baggy cry of post-war rage” that “is difficult to revive.” She made that observation in a column praising Rattigan’s “The Winslow Boy” as “a work of indestructible genius,” adding, “It is full of great scenes of high emotion, but its power lies in the small domestic details, lightly sketched, of a family torn apart by their own principled stand.”
As for Rattigan’s 70-minute “The Browning Version,” the story of Andrew Crocker-Harris, a man who has walled off his feelings to shield himself from the disdain of an unfaithful wife and the indifference of the world around him, it is as close to perfect as any modern play written in English.
Terence Davies, who directed the 2011 movie adaptation of “The Deep Blue Sea,” for which Rachel Weisz won a Golden Globe award as Best Actress in a Motion Picture, was asked if he could explain why Rattigan’s work has worn better than so many kitchen sink plays that now seem hopelessly dated. His answer: “I would say it’s his humanity.”
