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).
Separate Tables
In November 1956, towards the end of the two-year run of Separate Tables in the West End, Terence Rattigan was at the height of his career. After playing to full houses and overwhelmingly approving reviews in London, the play had just opened in New York to be hailed as the first triumphant success of the 1956/57 Broadway season. The Sleeping Prince, his pièce d’occasion, written to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation, was being filmed with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. The cinema rights to Separate Tables had been sold, and the resulting film would eventually accrue Oscar nominations in seven categories, and win in two of them.
But over the previous six months, things had been stirring in British theatre. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which Rattigan had dismissed intemperately at its premiere in May 1956, marked the beginning of a sea-change in theatrical tastes; the names of Osborne, Wesker, Delaney, and Pinter would, by the end of the decade, have eclipsed the names of Coward, Priestley, Eliot and Fry. The sharp realignment of allegiances was firmly brought home to Rattigan in 1958 in the barrage of scornful, dismissive reviews that greeted his next play, Variation on a Theme. Despite producing powerful and challenging work in the sixties and seventies like Ross, Man and Boy, In Praise of Love and Cause Célèbre, Rattigan was now treated as a stilted curiosity from a happily forgotten era. Separate Tables was his last success before perhaps the most sudden and dramatic fall from grace of any playwright this century.
However, this picture is inevitably somewhat oversimplified. Throughout the fifties, there had been growing debate about his work, and what he stood for. Separate Tables has historically carried the burden of competing views of Rattigan, which are still at play in the contemporary response to this piece.
For Rattigan, the decade had begun with his article ‘Concerning the Play of Ideas’ in The New Statesman and Nation. Rattigan often overreached himself when making programmatic statements about the theatre, and nowhere more than here, in his simplistic declaration that ‘From Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams the only theatre that has ever mattered is the theatre of character and narrative’ and that ‘ideas . . . take third place’.1 There is something of a contradiction between denouncing ideas in the theatre and propounding them in the New Statesman, and his statement, in any case, underestimated the way in which his own plays often artfully depict social forces through character and narrative. His article unleashed the combined assault of, amongst others, James Bridie, Sean O’Casey, Ted Willis, Christopher Fry and eventually George Bernard Shaw, choosing to set this ‘irrational genius’ right in a dazzling, if opaque, outline of the role of ideas in theatrical history.2 Rattigan’s final response, claiming masochistically to be honoured by the calibre of caning he had received, shows some recognition of the flaws in his initial conception, particularly in his admission that perhaps his rating of character above ideas was a ‘question of emphasis’ rather than a categorical exclusion of the latter by the former.3
Nonetheless, Rattigan returned to the fray in 1953 when the first two volumes of his Collected Plays were published. In his introduction to the second volume, Rattigan is musing on his desire to become a playwright. Even, when youthfully trying his hand at prose, he notes, his real ambitions were clear from the grandiose title page which proudly announced the work to be ‘an enthralling novelette by the famous […] playwrite and author…’.4 The precedence of ‘playwrite’ over author indicated a preference for writing which would be tested against an audience, and Rattigan insisted that this audience, in all its contradictions, is a crucial element in the formulation and construction of a play.
Rattigan was not exactly his own worst enemy, but he could be one of them. It was evidently a feeling of the greatest self-confidence, and perhaps of scores left unsettled from the ‘Play of Ideas’ controversy, that impelled him to invent Aunt Edna (see biographical introduction, pp. xi-xii). This characterisation of the contemporary theatre audience as a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow housewife was not, as I have argued elsewhere, an unreasonable, nor wholly uncomplicated, invention;5 yet Edna was seized upon (and his reception at the New Statesman might have prepared him for this) as a projection of Rattigan’s supposedly complacent and timid theatrical ambitions. Joe Orton’s later, satirical invention of Edna Welthorpe, the permanently scandalised crusader for Middle England, is a clear echo of Rattigan’s creation.6
Separate Tables, Rattigan’s first major play to open in Edna’s wake, had its reception muted by the hesitation she was occasioning in the minds of his critics. The play was well reviewed; Maurice Wiltshire, in the Daily Mail, declared that ‘the high point reached by Mr Rattigan as a serious dramatist in The Deep Blue Sea has been passed. In my opinion he is now without question the master playwright of our day’.7 But a recurring ploy of the reviewers is to pay a backhanded compliment to Rattigan’s ability as a craftsman and a storyteller. W. A. Darlington admitted he was not moved by the play, yet praised the way that ‘all the skill that had gone into its making [is] cunningly concealed’. Anthony Cookman praises Rattigan’s ‘skill’ in a review for The Tatler and Bystander which was headlined ‘Craftsman at Work’. J. C. Trewin refers to Rattigan as ‘professional’ six times across his reviews for the Illustrated London News and The Sketch. In the former he writes, ‘it does not spring from life. It is Mr Rattigan inventing a good story’.
What underlies these attacks of faint praise is a worry that Rattigan’s ‘professional skill’ is that of a manipulator, whose real feelings are softened by his desire to please Aunt Edna. The reviewer in The Times comes out with it, as he amplifies the widespread uncertainty by saying that, in Separate Tables, Rattigan is ‘almost at his best as an artist and quite at his best as a storyteller who is careful to please the numerous body of playgoers whom he has personified in an Aunt Edna’. The reviewer goes on: ‘His Aunt Edna […] likes happy endings and she is not over particular as to the dramatic methods employed to bring them about. Mr Rattigan’s determination to consult her wishes on this matter doubtless accounts for a faint streak of falsity which runs through these extremely interesting stage stories’. Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard and John Barber in the Daily Express both detect the same feigned quality, Barber claiming that ‘in both plays you see the exact point at which Rattigan stops telling the truth about his people’. Kenneth Tynan’s review took the form of a dialogue between Aunt Edna and a Young Perfectionist, ending with the brilliantly damning exchange:
AUNT EDNA. Clearly, there is something here for both of us.
YOUNG PERFECTIONIST. Yes. But not quite enough for either of us.8
This sense of Rattigan being caught between the incompatible demands of theatre’s young idealists and its hidebound Ednas would be fully articulated and nailed to Rattigan’s reputation after 1956. It is, indeed, a charge that has been laid against many of the playwrights of Rattigan’s generation; plays like J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls were for a long time dismissed as repertory-theatre warhorses, their grudgingly-acknowledged merits written off as entirely technical.
The claim is not false as such, but the response to Edna and the reviews for this play mark the beginning of a desire to see plays which do not acknowledge their technical craft. From this springs an enduring myth of pure expression, untutored and
spontaneous creativity, that appeared to find its form in the early works of Osborne, Wesker and Delaney. The truth is, surely, that the plays of the New Wave are also shaped by theatrical craft, albeit unacknowledged. The moral vision embodied by these later plays was one which valued authenticity over craft, while nonetheless using craft to make the case. Rattigan’s error, if error it was, lay in his admission in 1953 that he consciously crafted his plays, that he worked with and against an audience’s expectations; after 1956, it became conventional to pretend that the audience were of no importance in the construction and production of a play. And it is this latter view that was false, not Rattigan’s.
Indeed in Separate Tables, the tension between Rattigan’s care for the emotional complexity of character and his skill as a craftsman is itself pressed into service to deepen and enrich the events it describes. The play was written during a period in which Rattigan was struggling to negotiate very different impulses in his own life; the left-wing politics that he pursued in the 1930s were being challenged by a drift towards Liberalism; his homosexuality marked a kind of tangent from the rather exalted haut bourgeois circles of wealth and confidence in which he was moving; and as he moved into his forties, and towards middle age, he was no longer the rising young star of the British theatre. All of these tensions would be theatricalised in Separate Tables.
Frank Rattigan, Terry’s father, had died three days after the opening of The Deep Blue Sea, in March 1952. That winter, Rattigan agreed to pay for his mother, Vera, to move closer to him, and put her up at a small residential hotel in Stanhope Gardens, South Kensington. Paul Bailey, in his introduction to Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, a novel which beautifully captures the final years of the residential hotel, refers to these curious institutions as ‘chintzbedecked battlegrounds’.9 It was Rattigan’s visits to his mother, in one of these sequestered, fading citadels of loneliness, that the idea for his new play began to form. The result was Separate Tables, comprising two one-act plays, originally titled Table by the Window and Table by the Door, the latter being retitled Table Number Seven during rehearsal. When published, the source and inspiration would be shyly acknowledged in Rattigan’s dedication of the play to his mother.
Table by the Window deals with the relationship between John Malcolm, an ex-Labour MP, who spent time in prison for assaulting his wife, Anne Shankland, and who now lives a life of virtual anonymity, writing for a left-wing weekly, New Outlook, under the name ‘Cato’. He is in a relationship with Miss Cooper, the manageress of the Beauregard Private Hotel, Bournemouth, where Anne turns up unexpectedly. Their successful reconciliation is disrupted when John discovers that her ‘accidental’ arrival was actually arranged, and he suspects her of trying to ‘enslave’ him again. But Miss Cooper, recognising the strength of feeling on both sides, gives way to Anne, and at the end of the play Anne and John have tentatively agreed to try again.
In the second piece, set in the same place but eighteen months later, the focus is now on Major David Pollock, a long-term, ex-public school resident who has struck up a curious friendship with Sibyl, the infantilised, terrorised, fragile daughter of the tyrannical Mrs Railton-Bell. Despite Pollock’s best efforts to hide the report of it in the local newspaper, Mrs Railton Bell discovers that he has been arrested for molesting women in a cinema, and that his identity is largely confected: he never was a Major, never went to Wellington School. She calls a residents’ meeting, and, despite many misgivings, they are railroaded into voting for Pollock’s expulsion from the Hotel. Despite Miss Cooper’s urging, Pollock prepares to leave. That evening the residents settle down to dinner and are surprised when Pollock also takes up his usual table. To Mrs Railton-Bell’s horror, the residents, one by one, acknowledge Mr Pollock’s presence, and tacitly accept him back into the hotel. When Sibyl herself, who had been utterly distraught and sickened by the news report, rebels against her mother, Mrs Railton-Bell leaves the dining room, and the diners continue with their meal.
It is instructive to see how Rattigan developed the two plays that make up Separate Tables. The earliest notes for the play take the form of several loose-leaf foolscap pages on which during 1953 he noted fragments of dialogue, gossip, and chatter.10 From these small, isolated exchanges, a number of characters began to appear. On one page, Rattigan, with many crossings out and emendations, lists the following:
Lady R + companion most money
Eccentric. Dreams, sex, betting.
Cheerful Lady down in the world, terribly poor, Lady D
Boy girl. Undergraduates, married
Retired schoolmaster - anxiously awaiting son who neglects
Manageress Bright, cheerful ruthless and lonely “None of your sour-faced landladies”
In this list, it is already possible to see the genesis of Mrs Railton-Bell and Sibyl, as well as other residents of the Beauregard—Miss Meacham, Lady Matheson, Charles and Jean, Mr Fowler, and the manager, Miss Cooper. It is significant that the play emerged out of fragments of character and dialogue, because this is a key element of the play as a whole. Separate Tables introduces us to a network of characters and potential stories, such that it seems almost arbitrary that we follow one rather than another. The sense that there are other stories to tell accumulates a broader significance that enriches the individual stories that we are allowed to pursue. The double bill format, with its repetitions and parallels is an ideal form to explore this patterning of fragmentation and isolation; even so, and unlike his earlier double bill, Harlequinade and The Browning Version, the two plays are intimately connected, offering a fruitful tension between an individualistic focus on character and a more inclusive focus on narrative. Together, despite what Rattigan wrote in the New Statesman, they form a sophisticated ‘play of ideas’ which addresses a much broader vision of society than its secluded setting might initially suggest.
Separate Tables begins as it ends, in the dining room of the Beauregard Private Hotel. This cosy bourgeois tableau is, however, carefully arranged to offer a landscape of solitude and isolation. Charles and Jean are sitting at the same table, but are both studiously reading. Miss Meacham is myopically inspecting the racing tips. Mr Fowler is alone at a table, ‘quiet and impassive-looking’ (p. 6). Mrs Railton-Bell’s silver fox fur isolates her in her ‘rather bare and quite unpretentious’ surroundings (p. 5). The isolation of these characters, at their separate tables, is the background against which all subsequent events will unfold.
But while this one tone is established very quickly, the mood changes somewhat with the rumoured appearance of Anne. Characters relate brief sightings, comment on her dress and luggage, and offer their own prying speculations about her. This tells us something very clear about what we have seen: there are in fact connections between the characters, but they are on the level of gossip and surveillance. It gives the initial image of isolation a dangerous, fearful quality.
It is an extension of a technique Rattigan used in The Deep Blue Sea, to transform the conventional complacency of the West End ‘room’ into something darker, suggesting a refuge erected fearfully against the outside. Throughout Separate Tables, the devices used so often to move characters around the well-made play are put to different, more sophisticated ends. The telephone, so often pressed into service to give someone a convenient exit, is here poised on the threshold between the safety within and the danger without: its failure to ring crushes Mr Fowler; it reveals Anne’s plan to John; and Mr Pollock, trying furtively to leave, finds himself trapped in the lounge of the Beauregard because Miss Meacham is on the phone in the corridor outside. Ironically, the hotel which was once his refuge has become a kind of prison.
This patterning of imprisonment and surveillance profoundly links Separate Tables to mid-century homosexual experience. In his book, Discipline and Punish, one of the major contemporary theorists of sexuality, Michel Foucault, argues that the form of the modern state was explicitly modelled on the Panopticon, a plan for a prison drawn up by the philosopher Jere
my Bentham. In the Panopticon, the cells are arranged in a circle around a central guard tower. The prisoners cannot see each other, but the guard can see all of the prisoners. Foucault argues that this structure induces in the prisoners a perpetual feeling of being watched that persists even when the guard is not in the tower. This observability is internalised by the prisoners, who thereby adopt the rules of the system. Foucault’s later book, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, discusses a nineteenth-century change in Western culture’s handling of sex and sexuality. He argues that the standard images of Victorian sexual repression and silence are false; instead, during this era, people were encouraged to start seeing sexuality as a key part of their identities, which when confessed, revealed, brought out into the open, could help individuals understand themselves and others. But this mechanism for making sexuality visible, no less than the model of the Panopticon, was an operation of power, designed to control, not liberate.
This historical principle of trying to control illicit sexuality by making it visible had a particular force and relevance when Rattigan was writing Separate Tables. In the early 1950s, widespread scare stories had begun circulating in the press about an epidemic of homosexual activity. Partly precipitated by the surprisingly high figures of ‘prevalence’ published in the Kinsey Report on male sexuality in 1948, partly in response to pressure from the American government, still in the throes of the McCarthyite witchhunt against any form of political and sexual ‘deviation’, and also the flight to Russia of the homosexual spies, Burgess and MacLean, the press noted that the police were planning a crackdown on ‘vice’. The ‘problem’ of homosexuality was that it was not immediately detectable; indeed, virtually all homosexuals were expert at ‘passing’ as straight. This flouting of the principles of the modern state seemed in need of address, and newspaper editorials and feature articles urged that ‘it is necessary to turn the searchlight of publicity onto these abnormalities […] Bringing the horrors of the situation out into the open is the first necessary step to getting control’.11
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