Terence Rattigan
WHO IS SYLVIA?
and
DUOLOGUE
Introduced by
Dan Rebellato
NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
Contents
Title Page
Introduction to Terence Rattigan
Introduction to Who is Sylvia? and Duologue
List of Rattigan’s produced plays
Who is Sylvia?
Duologue
About the Author
Copyright and Performing Rights Information
Terence Rattigan (1911–1977)
Terence Rattigan stood on the steps of the Royal Court Theatre, on 8 May 1956, after the opening night of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Asked by a reporter what he thought of the play, he replied, with an uncharacteristic lack of discretion, that it should have been retitled ‘Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I’m being.’1 And he was right. The great shifts in British theatre, marked by Osborne’s famous premiere, ushered in kinds of playwriting which were specifically unlike Rattigan’s work. The pre-eminence of playwriting as a formal craft, the subtle tracing of the emotional lives of the middle classes – those techniques which Rattigan so perfected – fell dramatically out of favour, creating a veil of prejudice through which his work even now struggles to be seen.
Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born on 10 June 1911, a wet Saturday a few days before George V’s coronation. His father, Frank, was in the diplomatic corps and Terry’s parents were often posted abroad, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandmother. Frank Rattigan was a geographically and emotionally distant man, who pursued a string of little-disguised affairs throughout his marriage. Rattigan would later draw on these memories when he created Mark St Neots, the bourgeois Casanova of Who is Sylvia? Rattigan was much closer to his mother, Vera Rattigan, and they remained close friends until her death in 1971.
Rattigan’s parents were not great theatregoers, but Frank Rattigan’s brother had married a Gaiety Girl, causing a minor family uproar, and an apocryphal story suggests that the ‘indulgent aunt’ reported as taking the young Rattigan to the theatre may have been this scandalous relation.2 And when, in the summer of 1922, his family went to stay in the country cottage of the drama critic Hubert Griffiths, Rattigan avidly worked through his extensive library of playscripts. Terry went to Harrow in 1925, and there maintained both his somewhat illicit theatregoing habit and his insatiable reading, reputedly devouring every play in the school library. Apart from contemporary authors like Galsworthy, Shaw and Barrie, he also read the plays of Chekhov, a writer whose crucial influence he often acknowledged.3
His early attempts at writing, while giving little sign of his later sophistication, do indicate his ability to absorb and reproduce his own theatrical experiences. There was a ten-minute melodrama about the Borgias entitled The Parchment, on the cover of which the author recommends with admirable conviction that a suitable cast for this work might comprise ‘Godfrey Tearle, Gladys Cooper, Marie Tempest, Matheson Lang, Isobel Elsom, Henry Ainley… [and] Noël Coward’.4 At Harrow, when one of his teachers demanded a French playlet for a composition exercise, Rattigan, undaunted by his linguistic shortcomings, produced a full-throated tragedy of deception, passion and revenge which included the immortal curtain line: ‘COMTESSE. (Souffrant terriblement.) Non! non! non! Ah non! Mon Dieu, non!’5 His teacher’s now famous response was ‘French execrable: theatre sense first class’.6 A year later, aged fifteen, he wrote The Pure in Heart, a rather more substantial play showing a family being pulled apart by a son’s crime and the father’s desire to maintain his reputation. Rattigan’s ambitions were plainly indicated on the title pages, each of which announced the author to be ‘the famous playwrite and author T. M. Rattigan.’7
Frank Rattigan was less than keen on having a ‘playwrite’ for a son and was greatly relieved when in 1930, paving the way for a life as a diplomat, Rattigan gained a scholarship to read History at Trinity, Oxford. But Rattigan’s interests were entirely elsewhere. A burgeoning political conscience that had led him to oppose the compulsory Officer Training Corps parades at Harrow saw him voice pacifist and socialist arguments at college, even supporting the controversial Oxford Union motion ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ in February 1933. The rise of Hitler (which he briefly saw close at hand when he spent some weeks in the Black Forest in July 1933) and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War saw his radical leanings deepen and intensify. Rattigan never lost his political compassion. After the war he drifted towards the Liberal Party, but he always insisted that he had never voted Conservative, despite the later conception of him as a Tory playwright of the establishment.8
Away from the troubled atmosphere of his family, Rattigan began to gain in confidence as the contours of his ambitions and his identity moved more sharply into focus. He soon took advantage of the university’s theatrical facilities and traditions. He joined the Oxford Union Dramatic Society (OUDS), where contemporaries included Giles Playfair, George Devine, Peter Glenville, Angus Wilson and Frith Banbury. Each year, OUDS ran a one-act play competition and in Autumn 1931 Rattigan submitted one. Unusually, it seems that this was a highly experimental effort, somewhat like Konstantin’s piece in The Seagull. George Devine, the OUDS president, apparently told the young author, ‘Some of it is absolutely smashing, but it goes too far.’9 Rattigan was instead to make his first mark as a somewhat scornful reviewer for the student newspaper, Cherwell, and as a performer in the Smokers (OUDS’s private revue club), where he adopted the persona and dress of ‘Lady Diana Coutigan’, a drag performance which allowed him to discuss leading members of the Society with a barbed camp wit.10
That the name of his Smokers persona echoed the contemporary phrase, ‘queer as a coot’, indicates Rattigan’s new-found confidence in his homosexuality. In February 1932, Rattigan played a tiny part in the OUDS production of Romeo and Juliet, which was directed by John Gielgud and starred Peggy Ashcroft and Edith Evans (women undergraduates were not admitted to OUDS, and professional actresses were often recruited). Rattigan’s failure to deliver his one line correctly raised an increasingly embarrassing laugh every night (an episode which he reuses to great effect in Harlequinade). However, out of this production came a friendship with Gielgud and his partner, John Perry. Through them, Rattigan was introduced to theatrical and homosexual circles, where his youthful ‘school captain’ looks were much admired.
A growing confidence in his sexuality and in his writing led to his first major play. In 1931, he shared rooms with a contemporary of his, Philip Heimann, who was having an affair with Irina Basilevich, a mature student. Rattigan’s own feelings for Heimann completed an eternal triangle that formed the basis of the play he co-wrote with Heimann, First Episode. This play was accepted for production in Surrey’s ‘Q’ theatre; it was respectfully received and subsequently transferred to the Comedy Theatre in London’s West End, though carefully shorn of its homosexual subplot. Despite receiving only £50 from this production (and having put £200 into it), Rattigan immediately dropped out of college to become a full-time writer.
Frank Rattigan was displeased by this move, but made a deal with his son. He would give him an allowance of £200 a year for two years and let him live at home to write; if at the end of that period, he had had no discernible success, he would enter a more secure and respectable profession. With this looming deadline, Rattigan wrote quickly. Black Forest, an O’Neill-inspired play based on his experiences in Germany in 1933, is one of the three that have survived. Rather unwillingly, he collaborated with Hector Bolitho on an adaptation of the latter’s novel, Grey Farm,
which received a disastrous New York production in 1940. Another project was an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, written with Gielgud; this fell through at the last minute when Donald Albery, the play’s potential producer, received a complaint from actor-manager John Martin-Harvey who was beginning a farewell tour of his own adaptation, The Only Way, which he had been performing for forty-five years. As minor compensation, Albery invited Rattigan to send him any other new scripts. Rattigan sent him a play provisionally titled Gone Away, based on his experiences in a French-language summer school in 1931. Albery took out a nine-month option on it, but no production appeared.
By mid-1936, Rattigan was despairing. His father had secured him a job with Warner Brothers as an in-house screenwriter, which was reasonably paid; but Rattigan wanted success in the theatre, and his desk-bound life at Teddington Studios seemed unlikely to advance this ambition. By chance, one of Albery’s productions was unexpectedly losing money, and the wisest course of action seemed to be to pull the show and replace it with something cheap. Since Gone Away required a relatively small cast and only one set, Albery quickly arranged for a production. Harold French, the play’s director, had only one qualm: the title. Rattigan suggested French Without Tears, which was immediately adopted.
After an appalling dress rehearsal, no one anticipated the rapturous response of the first-night audience, led by Cicely Courtneidge’s infectious laugh. The following morning Kay Hammond, the show’s female lead, discovered Rattigan surrounded by the next day’s reviews. ‘But I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Even The Times likes it.’11
French Without Tears played over 1000 performances in its three-year run and Rattigan was soon earning £100 a week. He moved out of his father’s home, wriggled out of his Warner Brothers contract, and dedicated himself to spending the money as soon as it came in. Partly this was an attempt to defer the moment when he had to follow up this enormous success. In the event, both of his next plays were undermined by the outbreak of war.
After the Dance, an altogether more bleak indictment of the Bright Young Things’ failure to engage with the iniquities and miseries of contemporary life, opened, in June 1939, to euphoric reviews; but only a month later the European crisis was darkening the national mood and audiences began to dwindle. The play was pulled in August after only sixty performances. Follow My Leader was a satirical farce closely based on the rise of Hitler, co-written with an Oxford contemporary, Tony Goldschmidt (writing as Anthony Maurice in case anyone thought he was German). It suffered an alternative fate. Banned from production in 1938, owing to the Foreign Office’s belief that ‘the production of this play at this time would not be in the best interests of the country’,12 it finally received its premiere in 1940, by which time Rattigan and Goldschmidt’s mild satire failed to capture the real fears that the war was unleashing in the country.
Rattigan’s insecurity about writing now deepened. An interest in Freud, dating back to his Harrow days, encouraged him to visit a psychiatrist that he had known while at Oxford, Dr Keith Newman. Newman exerted a Svengali-like influence on Rattigan and persuaded the pacifist playwright to join the RAF as a means of curing his writer’s block. Oddly, this unorthodox treatment seemed to have some effect; by 1941, Rattigan was writing again. On one dramatic sea crossing, an engine failed, and with everyone forced to jettison all excess baggage and possessions, Rattigan threw the hard covers and blank pages from the notebook containing his new play, stuffing the precious manuscript into his jacket.
Rattigan drew on his RAF experiences to write a new play, Flare Path. Bronson Albery and Bill Linnit who had supported French Without Tears both turned the play down, believing that the last thing that the public wanted was a play about the war.13 H. M. Tennent Ltd., led by the elegant Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, was the third management offered the script; and in 1942, Flare Path opened in London, eventually playing almost 700 performances. Meticulously interweaving the stories of three couples against the backdrop of wartime uncertainty, Rattigan found himself ‘commended, if not exactly as a professional playwright, at least as a promising apprentice who had definitely begun to learn the rudiments of his job’.14 Beaumont, already on the way to becoming the most powerful and successful West End producer of the era, was an influential ally for Rattigan. There is a curious side-story to this production; Dr Keith Newman decided to watch 250 performances of this play and write up the insights that his ‘serial attendance’ had afforded him. George Bernard Shaw remarked that such playgoing behaviour ‘would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that [Newman] came out of it without a slight derangement’. Shaw’s caution was wise.15 In late 1945, Newman went insane and eventually died in a psychiatric hospital.
Meanwhile, Rattigan had achieved two more successes; the witty farce, While the Sun Shines, and the more serious, though politically clumsy, Love in Idleness (retitled O Mistress Mine in America). He had also co-written a number of successful films, including The Day Will Dawn, Uncensored, The Way to the Stars and an adaptation of French Without Tears. By the end of 1944, Rattigan had three plays running in the West End, a record only beaten by Somerset Maugham’s four in 1908.
Love in Idleness was dedicated to Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the Tory MP who had become Rattigan’s lover. Channon’s otherwise gossipy diaries record their meeting very discreetly: ‘I dined with Juliet Duff in her little flat… also there, Sibyl Colefax and Master Terence Rattigan, and we sparkled over the Burgundy. I like Rattigan enormously, and feel a new friendship has begun. He has a flat in Albany.’16 Tom Driberg’s rather less discreet account fleshes out the story: Channon’s ‘seduction of the playwright was almost like the wooing of Danaë by Zeus – every day the playwright found, delivered to his door, a splendid present – a case of champagne, a huge pot of caviar, a Cartier cigarette box in two kinds of gold… In the end, of course, he gave in, saying apologetically to his friends, “How can one not?”.’17 It was a very different set in which Rattigan now moved, one that was wealthy and conservative, the very people he had criticised in After the Dance. Rattigan did not share the complacency of many of his friends, and his next play revealed a deepening complexity and ambition.
For a long time, Rattigan had nurtured a desire to become respected as a serious writer; the commercial success of French Without Tears had, however, sustained the public image of Rattigan as a wealthy, young, light-comedy writer-about-town.18 With The Winslow Boy, which premiered in 1946, Rattigan began to turn this image around. In doing so he entered a new phase as a playwright. As one contemporary critic observed, this play ‘put him at once into the class of the serious and distinguished writer’.19 The play, based on the Archer-Shee case in which a family attempted to sue the Admiralty for a false accusation of theft against their son, featured some of Rattigan’s most elegantly crafted and subtle characterisation yet. The famous second curtain, when the barrister Robert Morton subjects Ronnie Winslow to a vicious interrogation before announcing that ‘The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief’, brought a joyous standing ovation on the first night. No less impressive is the subtle handling of the concept of ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ through the play of ironies which pits Morton’s liberal complacency against Catherine Winslow’s feminist convictions.
Two years later, Rattigan’s Playbill, comprising the one-act plays The Browning Version and Harlequinade, showed an ever deepening talent. The latter is a witty satire of the kind of touring theatre encouraged by the new Committee for the Encouragement of Music and Arts (CEMA, the immediate forerunner of the Arts Council). But the former’s depiction of a failed, repressed Classics teacher evinced an ability to choreograph emotional subtleties on stage that outstripped anything Rattigan had yet demonstrated.
Adventure Story, which in 1949 followed hard on the heels of Playbill, was less successful. An attempt to dramatise the emotional dilemmas of Alexander the Great, Rattigan seemed unable to escape the vernacular of his own circle, and the epic scheme of the play sat oddly with Alexander’s more p
rosaic concerns.
Rattigan’s response to both the critical bludgeoning of this play and the distinctly lukewarm reception of Playbill on Broadway was to write a somewhat extravagant article for the New Statesman. ‘Concerning the Play of Ideas’ was a desire to defend the place of ‘character’ against those who would insist on the pre-eminence in drama of ideas.20 The essay is not clear and is couched in such teasing terms that it is at first difficult to see why it should have secured such a fervent response. James Bridie, Benn Levy, Peter Ustinov, Sean O’Casey, Ted Willis, Christopher Fry and finally George Bernard Shaw all weighed in to support or condemn the article. Finally Rattigan replied in slightly more moderate terms to these criticisms insisting (and the first essay reasonably supports this) that he was not calling for the end of ideas in the theatre, but rather for their inflection through character and situation.21 However, the damage was done (as, two years later, with his ‘Aunt Edna’, it would again be done). Rattigan was increasingly being seen as the archproponent of commercial vacuity.22
The play Rattigan had running at the time added weight to his opponents’ charge. Originally planned as a dark comedy, Who is Sylvia? became a rather more frivolous thing both in the writing and the playing. Rattled by the failure of Adventure Story, and superstitiously aware that the new play was opening at the Criterion, where fourteen years before French Without Tears had been so successful, Rattigan and everyone involved in the production had steered it towards light farce and obliterated the residual seriousness of the original conceit.
Rattigan had ended his affair with Henry Channon and taken up with Kenneth Morgan, a young actor who had appeared in Follow My Leader and the film of French Without Tears. However, the relationship had not lasted and Morgan had for a while been seeing someone else. Rattigan’s distress was compounded one day in February 1949, when he received a message that Morgan had killed himself. Although horrified, Rattigan soon began to conceive an idea for a play. Initially it was to have concerned a homosexual relationship, but Beaumont, his producer, persuaded him to change the relationship to a heterosexual one.23 At a time when the Lord Chamberlain refused to allow any plays to be staged that featured homosexuality, such a proposition would have been a commercial impossibility. The result is one of the finest examples of Rattigan’s craft. The story of Hester Collyer, trapped in a relationship with a man incapable of returning her love, and her transition from attempted suicide to groping, uncertain self-determination is handled with extraordinary economy, precision and power. The depths of despair and desire that Rattigan plumbs have made The Deep Blue Sea one of his most popular and moving pieces.
Who is Sylvia? and Duologue Page 1