Separate Tables

by Terence Rattigan

  With the plays written, the obvious choice of producer would normally have been the manager of H. M. Tennent Ltd., ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the most powerful producer in the West End, who had presented many of Rattigan’s premieres. But the two had fallen out over The Sleeping Prince, when Beaumont had dragged his feet over the casting of Olivier and Vivien Leigh, only relenting when Rattigan threatened to take the play elsewhere. Rattigan also felt Beaumont had been rather peremptory in curtailing the run when box office receipts dipped. Perhaps to remind Beaumont that he was not the only game in town, Rattigan sent Separate Tables to Stephen Mitchell, a rival producer who had presented Playbill (The Browning Version and Harlequinade) after Beaumont had rejected it. Rattigan had long promised, one day, to write a follow-up, and Mitchell set about reconvening the team that had made Playbill so successful. Peter Glenville, who had directed Playbill and Adventure Story, was brought in as director. Olivier and Vivien Leigh had wanted to play the leads, but Olivier was committed to filming Richard III and was thus unavailable, so Eric Portman, who had played Crocker-Harris and Arthur Gosport in Playbill, was brought back to play Malcolm and the ‘Major’. Mary Ellis, who had proved somewhat difficult in 1948, was passed over in favour of Kay Walsh. Yet as rehearsals began, Walsh seemed increasingly unsuited to the roles of Anne and Sybil, and, rather than risk his new play, Rattigan asked that Glenville replace her with Margaret Leighton, an actress that Rattigan had long admired (and whom he had failed to persuade Frith Banbury to cast as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea). Another welcome feature of the production was the return to the stage of Phyllis Neilson-Terry (as Mrs Railton-Bell) and Jane Eccles (as Lady Matheson), after nine and twenty years, respectively.

  A new Terence Rattigan play was always a major theatrical event in the 1950s, and the opening at the St James’s Theatre, on 22 September 1954, following a month-long pre-London tour, was accompanied by a rush of publicity, and some excellent reviews. Harold Hobson thought Table Number Seven ‘one of Mr Rattigan’s masterpieces, in which he shows in a superlative degree his pathos, his humour, and his astounding mastery over that English language whose riches he despises,’ the last comment being a somewhat mealy-mouthed tribute to Rattigan’s ability to produce enormous emotional resonance from the trivia of ordinary conversation. All critics joined Gerard Fay in admiring the ‘boastful ease’ with which Eric Portman and Margaret Leighton effected their transitions from one play to the other. Leighton’s transformation from the glamorous model of the first half to the mousey, downtrodden creature of the second caused particular comment; at least two tabloids ran features in which Leighton offered make-up tips on how to avoid looking like the dowdy Sibyl.31 Looking at contemporary responses reminds us that in 1954, Britain was still in the final throes of rationing, as one newspaper drools that real food, including authentic hot buttered toast, is being used in the production. The production ran for 726 performances, and numbered among its first audience the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, which we have to understand was then a rather impressive and prestigious mark of theatrical success.

  The production, with a few minor alterations to the cast (though none, of course, to the script), opened at the Music Box Theatre, New York, on 25 October 1956. The production managed to overcome Broadway’s usual resistance to Rattigan’s work; Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times called it ‘the most penetrating enquiry into the human spirit that Mr Rattigan has yet written, and it considerably alters his reputation as a theatre writer’. Richard Watts, in the New York Post, found ‘beneath the sparkling surface of showmanship […] dramatic writing of notable insight, sympathy, emotional truth and keenly observing intelligence’. Variety’s prediction that the play would be a ‘smash’ was proved correct: the production ran for almost a year on Broadway, followed by a six-month national tour. Revivals soon appeared, including a production at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, starring Basil Rathbone and Geraldine Page.32

  Rattigan sold the film rights for over a third of a million dollars to independent producers Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster. The result is widely regarded as the finest screen adaptation of a Rattigan play. Directed by Delbert Mann, and starring Burt Lancaster as an Americanized John Malcolm, Deborah Kerr as Sibyl, David Niven as Mr Pollock, Rita Hayworth as Ann Shankland, Wendy Hiller as Miss Cooper and Gladys Cooper as Mrs Railton-Bell, the film was nominated for seven Oscars: best picture, actor (Niven), actress (Kerr), supporting actress (Hiller), adapted screenplay, cinematography, and musical score, with Niven and Hiller winning in their categories. In America, Separate Tables remains Rattigan’s best-known and most-admired play.33

  The subsequent British performance history of Separate Tables follows the usual pattern of Rattigan’s work. A number of touring and repertory productions immediately followed the end of the West End run. There were productions in Wimbledon, Richmond and Brighton in 1956, and in Bromley, Aberdeen, Derby and Dundee in 1957 amongst others. But major revivals dried up by the mid-sixties and between 1966 and 1973, no productions are recorded.

  The first West End revival came in the seventies, during a short-lived wave of revivals of Rattigan plays and reputation. A two-and-a-half-month tour of the play eventually worked its way into London at the Apollo Theatre early in 1977, directed by Michael Blakemore, who unnecessarily retitled the plays Table Number One and Table Number Two. The production starred John Mills and Jill Bennett—then, ironically, married to John Osborne—in the leads and Margaret Courtney and Zena Walker as Mrs Railton-Bell and Miss Cooper. Critics generally seemed to find Jill Bennett unconvincing as Sibyl, B. A. Young in the Financial Times explaining ‘I do not think she has it in her to be inadequate’. The meticulous construction of the second half was now an obstacle to many critics; the Daily Telegraph found the writing ‘obtrusively neat’ and ‘cunningly contrived’ though many agreed with the Observer’s detection of ‘good Strindbergian stuff’ in the first-half battle between John and Anne. The feeling remained that this was a period piece. In Punch’s theatre listings, the play was summarily dismissed with the line ‘two-star hotel in Hampshire, residents exquisitely embalmed’.34

  The next major revival came in 1993, hard on the heels of the Almeida’s magnificent, revelatory Deep Blue Sea. Peter Hall, directing the piece at the Albery Theatre, attempted to find in it a ‘state of the nation’ play about Britain at the twilight of its Empire; a faded Union Jack hung on the wall, and the play was punctuated with the playing of ‘Jerusalem’. The echoes and patterns of Pollock’s predicament were pointed up by Miriam Karlin, who played Miss Meacham, in Nicholas de Jongh’s words, as a ‘brisk, no-nonsense lesbian’. Critics were divided; Robert Hewison found Hall’s production reluctant to bring the emotional drama sufficiently near the surface, while Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘I suspect 1993 will be remembered as the year Terence Rattigan finally came in from the cold’, and, in a satisfying revision of the first critics’ objections, described the portrait of Mrs Railton-Bell as ‘Rattigan’s revenge on Aunt Edna’. The craftsmanship was less of a deterrent than it had been in 1977, and Billington in the Guardian was moved to remark that ‘when the hotel bigot […] is routed, one can scarce forbear to cheer’. The production also coincided with revivals of Coward’s Present Laughter and Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, leading Malcolm Rutherford in the Financial Times to argue that ‘if you look at the playwrights as a group, it is their continuity that stands out’.35

  The King’s Head Theatre, where Rattigan’s reassessment as a serious dramatist had started in 1976 with a pared-down revival of The Browning Version, offered another landmark production in 1998. This paired Harlequinade with Table Number Seven, but for the first time was able to present the revised, ‘gay version’ of the latter. Colin Ellwood’s production softened the sharp transition between the two plays with a brief dumbshow miming the games of coded seduction on the sea-front that illustrated Pollock’s own nocturnal stroll. Barbara Jefford’s splendidly beady-eyed Mrs Railton
-Bell suitably dominated Lucy Whybrow’s stammeringly intense Sibyl, and Barry Wallman’s Major Pollock suggested a man drained of courage by a life of subterfuge and performance. The critics were generally united in their admiration of what was, after all, a posthumous Rattigan premiere, Nicholas de Jongh noting ‘how luminously Rattigan evokes the sexually intolerant and phobic attitudes of Fifties middle England’ and Kate Bassett welcoming the newfound sense of ‘personal passion behind the heated ethical debate’.36

  Separate Tables is perhaps the play of Rattigan’s that was most damaged by the shrapnel flung out during the explosive realignment of British theatrical tastes in the mid-fifties. Long dismissed as a cosy warhorse, or melodramatic potboiler, the play hides beneath its immaculate and beautifully-wrought surface a dark and uncomfortable portrait of sexual oppression. Its delight in subtext, in tacit revolt, in silence is not a plea for an easy life, or an apology for quietism or emotional apathy; in its carefully crafted tales of rejection and reconciliation, it offers a vision of a tolerant, caring community, in which the vicious bonds of gossip and surveillance are replaced by those of understanding and respect. Its intervention into debates about the social control of sexuality are made with disarming delicacy yet great theatrical force, offering a quietly radical call for compassion and resistance to the forces of sexual persecution.

  Notes

  1. Terence Rattigan. ‘Concerning the Play of Ideas.’ New Statesman and Nation. (4 March 1950). pp. 242.

  2. George Bernard Shaw. ‘The Play of Ideas.’ New Statesman and Nation. (6 May 1950), p. 510.

  3. Terence Rattigan. ‘The Play of Ideas.’ New Statesman and Nation. (13 May 1950), p. 546.

  4. Terence Rattigan. Introduction. Collected Plays: Volume Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, p. viii.

  5. Dan Rebellato. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 104-113.

  6. cf. Joe Orton. The Orton Diaries. Edited by John Lahr. London: Methuen, 1986, pp. 271-289.

  7. All reviews, unless otherwise stated, from the Production File for Separate Tables. St. James’s Theatre. 22 September 1954, in the Theatre Museum, London.

  8. Kenneth Tynan. Tynan on Theatre. Penguin, 1964, p. 30.

  9. Paul Bailey. Introduction. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor. London: Virago, 1982 [originally published, 1971], p. x.

  10. The Rattigan Archive at the British Library, which is not yet fully catalogued, contains a large assortment of these handwritten notes for Separate Tables in an envelope marked ‘Table by the Window / Table by the Door / + / notes etc’. I must record my gratitude to Sally Brown at the British Library for her patient help in retrieving material from the archive.

  11. Douglas Warth. ‘Evil Men—Pt 2’ Sunday Pictorial, (25 May 1952), p. 15.

  12. There are several other such personal references in the play. The name of the street on which the Beauregard Hotel stands is Morgan Crescent, and the complainant in the cinema (and in the alternative version on the Esplanade) is called Osborne. Kenneth Morgan and Peter Osborne were former lovers of Rattigan’s. The relationship between John and Anne was probably part-inspired by Rattigan’s new partner, and in the name Shankland one can hear a distinct echo of his name: Michael Franklin. (He reappears, in the gay version of the second play, in the name of Pollock’s arresting officer.) The hotel to which David Pollock briefly considers going is in West Kensington, which one may fancifully speculate could have made him a fellow resident of Rattigan’s mother. The character of the ‘Major’ was perhaps also inspired by Rattigan’s father, also a Major, with an actively adulterous (though strictly heterosexual) sex life. Anne Shankland was also based on Rattigan’s friend, the model Jean Dawnay, who had a similarly violent domestic life; indeed, so close was the resemblance that Dawnay had to ask Rattigan to redraw the portrait to make it less obvious.

  13. The portrayal of Charles and Jean—the ‘transients’—complicates and deepens both stories. Jean’s ‘modern’ insistence on wanting a career before marriage or children echoes Anne in the first act, though the beginning of the second play shows that these principles have not been adhered to. In the first they appear as projections of the young John and Anne. By the second, their secret conventionality contrasts with Pollock’s more genuine sexual outsiderliness.

  14. Nicholas de Jongh. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 58.

  15. B. A. Young. The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986, p. 91.

  16. Quoted in Geoffrey Wansell. Terence Rattigan: A Biography. London: Fourth Estate, 1995, p. 258

  17. Tynan, op. cit., p. 30.

  18. Of course, his play could have been produced in a club theatre, but there it would have joined a long list of plays earnestly discussing the ‘problem’ of homosexuality, including Andrew Rosenthal’s Third Person, Julien Green’s South, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Roger Gellert’s Quaint Honour, Ronald Duncan’s The Catalyst, Philip King’s Serious Charge, and Philip King and Robin Maugham’s The Lonesome Road. These ‘thesis’ plays had their strengths, but Separate Tables would have been lost amongst them.

  19. Quoted in Wansell, op. cit., pp. 273-274. For the record, the Lord Chamberlain certainly did not suspect that Pollock’s crime could be anything other than is expressly stated. The reader, Geoffrey Dearmer, wrote of Table By the Door (as the second half was still titled when submitted for licence), ‘This is much the better of the two, I think being in no way far-fetched in plot. It is a little masterpiece’ Reader’s Report, 24 July 1954, Separate Tables. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence: 1954/6930. [British Library].

  20. In a letter to his American producer in 1956, Rattigan listed a whole raft of lines which are obviously responses to a homosexual, not a heterosexual, offence. cf. Wansell, op. cit., p. 274.

  21. Letter from Rattigan to Bob Whitehead, August 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 253.

  22. Quoted in ibid., p. 276.

  23. This claim was made in a newspaper article discussing the premiere of the gay version of Separate Tables, Dan Glaister, ‘Rattigan and the curious case of the gay major,’ Guardian, (26 February 1998), p. 3, and also in the revised reissue of Rattigan Plays: One. London: Methuen, 1999, p. xvi.

  24. My emphasis. The variants in both manuscript and typescript forms (with some manuscript notes) are contained in a single file in the Rattigan archive in the British Library. In the manuscript from which Mary Herring (Rattigan’s secretary) worked to prepare the typescript, the last two words have been struck out.

  25. An editorial, ‘The Police and the Montagu Case’ in the New Statesman and Nation xlvii, 1205 (10 April 1954), pp. 456-457, discussed one very highprofile trial and claimed that Lord Montagu was being persecuted by the police; at his original trial, the jury were unable to reach a verdict, no doubt partly because an important piece of evidence, a visa stamp in Montagu’s passport, was clearly a forgery, almost certainly perpetrated by the police in whose possession the document had lain for three months. The editorial also noted that Major Pitt-Rivers, another defendant, had his flat searched without a warrant. The airmen, with whom the defendants were supposed to have committed homosexual offences, ‘were known to have been similarly involved with twenty-four other men, none of whom was charged’ (p. 456). But because they turned (to use the unfortunate phrase) ‘Queen’s Evidence’ they had been granted immunity from prosecution. See also H. Montgomery Hyde. The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. London: Heinemann, 1970, pp. 215-225.

  26. See note 10..

  27. Terence Rattigan. The Deep Blue Sea. London: Nick Hern, 1999, p. 61.

  28. See note 10.

  29. There is an obvious affinity between Amanda, in Coward’s Private Lives, describing her relationship with Elyot ‘like two violent acids bubbling away in a nasty little matrimonial bottle’ (Collected Plays: Two. London: Methuen, 1999, p. 16) and Jo
hn’s suggestion that he and Anne are ‘like two chemicals that are harmless by themselves, but when brought together in a test-tube can make an explosive as deadly as dynamite’ (p. 60).

  30. According to his autobiography, Osborne told George Devine that he had ‘no high opinion of Separate Tables’, (Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Vol 2: 1955-1966. London: Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 9) yet John Malcolm, with his impetuous honesty, his North Country accent, and his hatred of agony aunt columns and his mother-in-law, bears a profound resemblance to Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of Look Back in Anger. John’s sympathy for the impoverished aristocrat, Lady Matheson, has affinities with Jimmy’s curious empathy for the faded colonial administrator, Colonel Redfern, and Jimmy and Alison, like John and Anne, break up and reunite at the end of their plays, despite the men’s claims that their partners have almost hypnotic powers of control, and that they use it to break down and consume the men they meet. Rattigan’s notorious suggestion, on the steps of the Royal Court, that Look Back in Anger was burdened by a desire to avoid resembling Rattigan’s work is perhaps more legitimate than has generally been thought.