Who is Sylvia? and Duologue

by Terence Rattigan

  37.See, for example, Rodney Garland’s novel about homosexual life in London, The Heart in Exile. London: W. H. Allen, 1953, p. 104.

  38.See note 36; and also ‘Rattigan Talks to John Simon,’ Theatre Arts. 46 (April 1962), p. 24.

  39.Terence Rattigan and Anthony Maurice. Follow My Leader. Typescript. Lord Chamberlain Play Collection: 1940/2. Box 2506. [British Library].

  40.Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 15.

  41.B. A. Young, op. cit., p. 162.

  42.Quoted in Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 56.

  43.Quoted in Sheridan Morley, op. cit.

  44.Darlow and Hodson, op. cit., p. 308.

  45.Guardian. (2 December 1977).

  Who is Sylvia?

  In the decade from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, Terence Rattigan wrote his four best-remembered dramas, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables. In 1950, halfway through that period, he also wrote perhaps his least-remembered and certainly most misunderstood play, Who is Sylvia? It was, as I will show, a struggle at every stage: for its author, the author’s agent, its potential cast, and its reviewers. The play has never had a major revival, did not make it to Broadway, and has tended to be regarded as an oddity and a failure. Who is Sylvia? is a curiosity in his career; but it’s a dramaturgical experiment of considerable interest and delicacy, very much ahead of its time, and also one of Rattigan’s most turbulently personal pieces of work.

  1949 had been something of a misstep in the middle of Rattigan’s golden period. His attempt to write a historical epic about Alexander the Great, Adventure Story, was poorly received and ran for only 108 performances, a poor showing compared to The Browning Version’s 245 and The Winslow Boy’s 476. The critics considered that Rattigan’s focus on Alexander’s psychology had failed to capture the great clash of ideas and civilisations in fourth-century Persia. Stung by these remarks, Rattigan wrote an article ‘Considering the Play of Ideas’, in which he claimed that plays could not be driven by ideas, only by character. It was an incautious performance, poorly expressed and petulant in tone. After a succession of ever more eminent interlocutors refuted his claims, Rattigan responded in milder and more sophisticated terms, but the damage – as with the ‘Aunt Edna’ saga three years later – was long-lasting; he seemed to be turning his back on ideas, politics, the idea that theatre might be a place for thought rather than mere entertainment.1

  That year had also seen a convulsion in Rattigan’s own life. Ten years before, during the filming of the screen version of French Without Tears, Rattigan had begun a brief affair with a young actor in the film, Kenneth Morgan. Towards the end of the war they met up again and resumed their relationship, now on a more serious basis. Rattigan had previously kept his lovers at arm’s length, but Morgan was different; Terry asked the young man to move in with him and found his usual role was reversed – the more Rattigan’s ardour increased, the more Morgan’s cooled. By the summer of 1948, their relationship was sharply deteriorating; Morgan resented being marginalised and patronised as ‘Terry’s boy’ by the playwright’s friends, and repeatedly threatened to leave.2 With Rattigan in the throes of preparations for his new play, Morgan met another actor and moved in with him.

  Believing Morgan to be the love of his life and convinced he would return, Rattigan was devastated to be informed, just before the one of the final previews of Adventure Story, that Kenneth Morgan, rejected by his new lover, had taken his own life. Rattigan saw in this terrible episode the seed of a play (which, after many transformations, would become The Deep Blue Sea3), but knew he could only write it once the emotional shock had begun to fade. Nonetheless, his next play, Who is Sylvia?, is also haunted by secret desires, the inequality of passion, and the elusiveness of love.

  Immediately after Adventure Story opened in March 1949, Rattigan took himself off to The Stag and Hounds in Binfield to begin writing. Later he would claim that his work was so misconceived he ‘had to tear up about fifty pages and start again’.4 In fact, he didn’t tear them up and most of those pages have remained, unread and unrecognised, in his personal papers. More strikingly, at Binfield, the fundamental structure of the play as it would eventually be performed and published was fixed and hardly deviated from.5

  The play goes through three main evolutions. Its first, incomplete, draft is called The Search for May, sketched out in March 1949. The second draft, retitled Green After April, was completed later that year. The third draft closely reworks the second, the changes being made in consultation with cast and director, and is called Who is Sylvia? The story remains fundamentally the same: a man, married and with a son, is drawn to women who resemble a childhood sweetheart. We see him at three stages of life – 1917, 1929,6 and 1950 – conducting, or attempting to conduct, affairs with three near-identical women: a shop girl, a flapper, and a model. At every turn his seduction is foiled: in the first act, by the arrival of the young woman’s brother; in the second, by the arrival of his son; and in the third, by the arrival of his wife, who explains that she has known about Sylvia and his assignations all along. The change of titles reflects the changing name of his fantasy image: from May, to April, to Sylvia.7

  Rattigan was a meticulous structural planner of plays. He understood the shape of his plays through the choreography of entrances and exits, revelations, and conversational patterns. In the notes he wrote for the first draft, for example, this is how he describes Act I:

  1. Mark – Doris.

  2. Mark telephone.

  3. Mark – Doris.

  4. Mark – Doris – Mrs Williams (interruption).

  5. Mark – Doris – Ethel.

  6. Mark – Doris – Ethel – Oscar.

  7. Oscar to change. Mark – Doris – Ethel.

  8. Oscar back. Ethel – Doris to kitchen, to wash up.

  9. Mark – Oscar.

  10. Girls back. Mark – Oscar.

  11. Mark out to get taxi. Oscar – Doris – Ethel.

  12. Doris to bed. Oscar’s doing. Oscar – Ethel.

  13. Mark back with taxi. Sends it away.

  14. Oscar Doris out to Savoy.

  15. Air raid. Mark out.8

  There are adjustments to the precise order of events, but this remains, through all the drafts, right up to the final version as published here, the shape of the first act. But what is perhaps more striking about this structural plan is what it does not contain: characterisation, tone, meaning, subtext, dialogue. Indeed, a hundred very different plays could be written to this outline.

  And it is the treatment of the material that changes most sharply. All the evidence is that Rattigan set out to write a rather serious play: an exploration of promiscuity, the search for an ideal love, and the dynamics of emotional immaturity. Notably, at the same time that he’s formulating his blast against the ‘Play of Ideas’ for the New Statesman, the notes-to-self that accompany the incomplete first draft articulate not just the play’s story but its ideas:

  The story of a man who looked for an ideal love through the physical side and found it on the non-physical, unrecognised until then.

  Moral. Compromise with life. Don’t look for love. Let love look for you.

  Against romantic love. The search for it may keep a man occupied and happy, but finding it may be a disaster.

  What do I want to say? Nothing very much. Ideal love doesn’t exist. A satisfactory relationship is more likely to exist on the non-physical, rather than the physical plane, but a man finds it hard to compromise with his body, and a division of life into the physical and non-physical may be the happiest solution. What about the wife? She needs it too. I cheat there by making her a bit of a freak. If she divided her life in the same way there’d be sure to be a catastrophe.

  The bachelor character will show the dangers of promiscuity – not too tragically I hope. He should have compromised too, and married, or worked out a durable and un-ideal relationship with someone.

  Compromise is the keynote. Look for the
ideal if you want to, but you’d better realise now that it doesn’t exist.

  The fact that it does (in one case in a thousand) complicates the issue. The sensible gamblers bet on égalités. But that’s not so much fun as betting en plein. The one shot in a thousand may come up. In the play it doesn’t.

  Was it worth it? The answer must be – yes, it was. The compromise is difficult and unromantic, but it it’s [sic] worth more than the alternative – an unsuccessful amateur sculptor, tied for life to a ‘May’ who will later turn out not to be May at all. May doesn’t exist anyway. That’s the point of the play.9

  There is very little like this document in Rattigan’s archives; rarely did he explicate ‘the point of the play’ in as full and lucid a way as this. And, strikingly, these notes do not evidently describe a light comedy; they seem to be notes for a stark examination of male sexuality and the need to reconcile sex with love, desire with daily life. The draft fragments have comic moments, but they are also very frank about the reality of the situation in a way that later drafts would not be.

  In the first draft, Doris (yet to be been renamed Daphne) is surprised that Mark is uncomfortable answering questions about his wife:

  DORIS. My, you are touchy. It’s a perfectly ordinary question to ask, isn’t it?

  MARK. No. I don’t think it is.

  DORIS. Well, I’ve been out with quite a lot of married gentlemen in my time, and they’ve never objected to being asked about their wives. In fact, it’s usually the one subject they like to spread themselves on.

  MARK. Well, I’m afraid that doesn’t apply to me.

  DORIS. Oh well. No offence, I’m sure.

  She smiles in silence. MARK drains a glass of champagne.

  MARK (at length). I’m sorry, Doris. You must forgive me. You see, this is my first essay in the extra-marital –

  DORIS. Come again.

  MARK. This is the first time, since I married seven years ago, that I’ve been out with any other woman but my wife.

  DORIS. Just fancy.10

  The dialogue is broadly realistic for the period and unflinchingly places the mechanics of adultery, Mark’s awkwardness, and Doris’s sexual experience front and centre.

  While this made for great moral and emotional complexity, Rattigan was concerned that if the conversations and situations seemed too real they would make problems for the play that its tripartite structure could not resolve. As he explained to Rex Harrison, ‘too many awkward and uncomfortable questions were raised which in light comedy can be gaily brushed aside; to wit, what happens to the discarded mistresses? The more considerable, as people, those ladies are, the more you will find the audience will worry about them when they are abandoned by Mark.’11

  So he started again, now pitching the play at a level of deliberate unreality. The play became lighter in tone, tripping gaily over the details of the affairs and remaining witty and lightly farcical. But it would be a mistake to assume that Rattigan wanted to shy away from the seriousness of his theme: his remarks to Rex Harrison make clear that his main concern was that the balance of the play would be disturbed with the audience caring less about Mark than his discarded girlfriends. And maintaining a balance of sympathies in the play gets to the heart of why this play was so important to Rattigan.

  Rattigan told one interviewer that the play was ‘based on the lives of two real people. A married couple… very good friends of mine.’12 He was being coy because the married couple he had in mind were his own parents. Frank Rattigan married Vera Houston in 1905 but was a faithless husband. He would often visit Rattigan at school with a new young woman on his arm, ‘improbable young ladies, who typically came from dress shops and had names like Cora,’ says Rattigan’s biographer, with an unconscious nod to Who is Sylvia? Once, when father and son went on holiday together, Terry was surprised to discover from the hotel register that he’d acquired a ‘sister’, the cover for Rattigan Senior’s latest dalliance. Vera put up with all this, though it caused her great suffering, which she confided in her son.

  Rattigan was by turns embarrassed for his father and angry on behalf of his mother, and had long wanted to write a play about ‘The Major’.13 There is no doubt that Mark is a portrait of Frank. In the early notes for the play, Rattigan writes Mark’s Who’s Who entry:

  Mark Arbour Who’s Who. b. 1885. Eldest son of Sir John Arbour and Lucy, née Wackett. Education. Eton and abroad. Entered diplomatic service 1908, passing third Attaché 1908, 3rd Secretary 1911, 2nd Secretary 1915, 1st Secretary 1921, Counsellor of Embassy 1928, Chargé d’Affaires Athens 1929, Head of Near Eastern department Foreign Office 1930, Minister in Montevideo 1935, Minister in Belgrade 1938, Foreign Office 1939-45 (Accompanying P.M. to Yalta and Potsdam). Ambassador Warsaw 1945. Ambassador to Paris 1946. C.M.G. 1919. K.C.M.G. 1936, created Lord Binfield 1946. M. 1909, Mary, 2nd daughter of Duke of Kelvedon, son (Peter) 1910, daughter (Elizabeth) 1911. Recreations: golf and sculpting.14

  Here’s the same entry, but I’ve replaced Mark’s information with Frank’s:

  William Frank Arthur Rattigan. b. 1879. 2nd son of Sir William Henry Rattigan and Evelyn, née Higgins. Education. Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford. Entered diplomatic service as attaché 1902, 3rd Secretary 1905, 2nd Secretary 1909, 1st Secretary 1916, Chargé d’Affaires Romania 1919, Counsellor of Embassy 1920. C.M.G. 1921. M. Vera, daughter of Arthur Houston K.C., son (Brian) 1908, (Terence) 1911. Recreations: philandering.

  The first half of Mark’s career almost exactly duplicates Frank’s, but six years later. The reason Frank’s entry is much shorter than Mark’s is that Frank’s career in diplomacy was cut short by an undiplomatic incident in Constantinople, when he was No. 2 in the British Embassy; in 1921, with Kemal Atatürk’s military campaign for Turkish nationhood growing ever stronger, he told the Turkish Foreign Minister that Britain would never agree to independence. Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, was furious at having the Government’s hands tied in this fashion, and Frank was quietly pensioned off.15

  A deep ambivalence towards Mark’s affairs runs through the play. Rattigan’s two biographers are divided over his intentions: for Wansell, Who is Sylvia? is an ‘attempt to explain his father to his mother, providing the woman he cared about so deeply with something approaching a reasoned explanation for her husband’s behaviour’; for Darlow, ‘Rattigan intended to put his father on the stage and damn him’.16 It’s clear from Rattigan’s original notes that he was unsure what attitude to take towards his principal character’s behaviour; writing, in visible confusion: ‘Of course one will sympathise with it – if one doesn’t it’s a bad play – but I suppose we can two-facedly deplore it at the same time. (No.)’17 He must have had mixed feelings about his father in any case; although he deplored the pain Frank was causing Vera, he occasionally played Oscar to Frank’s Mark, letting his father use his own flat for assignations.18

  But there’s a further reason for the ambivalence in the play. In some ways, Mark is also a portrait of Rattigan himself. Oscar describes Mark in the first act as an ‘emotional Peter Pan’, someone who ‘refuses to come out of the emotional nursery’. Mark rejoins: ‘what’s wrong with that? I prefer to keep my emotions adolescent. They’re far more enjoyable than adult ones’ (p. 35). In the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most influential accounts of homosexuality was drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis, and explained it as a kind of arrested development; children, so the argument goes, will have all kinds of desires and objects as infants but ‘normally’ most of these will be discarded during the Oedipal Phase leaving only heterosexual object-choices. To still have erotic attachments to people of your own sex is to have failed to get through the Oedipal Phase ‘correctly’. The British Medical Association in Homosexuality and Prostitution, for example, concludes that to be an adult homosexual ‘represents some immaturity of development’. Eustace Chesser in Odd Man Out: Homosexuality in Men and Women puts it more bluntly: ‘the invert has not grown up’.19

  Implausible though these accounts
seem to us now, they were popular in the mid-century, and Rattigan, an avid reader of Freud since school, held to their explanation of his own sexual feelings. Furthermore, he understood very well the requirement to lead something of a double life, just as Mark does. The fear of exposure, which runs right through the play, is not merely the traditional tension of a bedroom farce, but was a real daily concern for Rattigan. In The Man Who Loved Redheads, Rattigan’s screen adaptation of Who is Sylvia?, we see Mark and Sylvia’s first encounter as young teenagers, in a cupboard, playing hide-and-seek. No sooner have they shared a first, furtive kiss than the doors are flung open and ‘light shines in on the guilty pair. A crowd of grinning and malevolent juvenile faces appear in the doorway, and a chorus of catcalls and hoots greet MARK and SYLVIA.’20 It’s an image direct from Rattigan’s deepest fears, mixing secret sexuality and invasive public judgement.21

  Further clues link Mark and Terry. There’s a suggestion that Mark is undecided between his career as a diplomat and his desire to pursue sculpture, for which he has a gift. Rattigan had a similar dilemma between diplomacy and creativity: Frank wanted him to follow him into the Service, and it was only the success of French Without Tears that prevented it. Finally, we hear that soon after Mark’s fleeting encounter with the original Sylvia, she married and moved to South Africa. One of Rattigan’s first (unrequited) loves, Philip Heimann, with whom he wrote First Episode, also married shortly after they met and moved to South Africa; he may be Rattigan’s own great lost love.

  All of which suggests that Mark is an image of two Rattigans, père et fils; hence the ambivalence in the play. On one hand, Rattigan, certainly in the final act, mocks the aged roués and their hapless chasing after young women; on the other, he offers a sympathetic portrait of a man pursuing a love of which society would not approve. According to Michael Darlow, ‘from these conflicting intentions, the essential weaknesses of Who is Sylvia? grew.’22 The play was performed as a feather-light comedy, and so it is usually disregarded as such. The moral dilemmas that arise unbidden in the first draft have disappeared; indeed, for a sex farce, it is remarkably chaste – the structure of each act is a kind of coitus interruptus – and, as Doris remarks in Act Three, the offstage bedroom is ‘really never used’ (p. 84).23