French Without Tears

by Terence Rattigan

  The play made stars of its leading cast and a rich man of its author. It immediately began to sell out, and, as Rex Harrison recalled, ‘We became a vogue, a household word, and everybody, from royalty to aristocracy to café-society, dropped in to see us’.23 Queen Mary came to see the play in February 1937; a Paris production (with the original ending) opened in July 1937, which ran for a year; a month later, a regional tour began and in September it opened in New York. Paramount paid five thousand pounds for the film rights of a play which Rattigan had offered for £200 only two years before, and soon he was earning well in excess of £100 a week. Always delighted to live beyond his means, Rattigan was estimated to have made in excess of £23,000 from the play and to have spent or gambled it all away by the end of the play’s run, in May 1939, by which time it had achieved 1,039 performances and become London’s biggest theatrical hit of the 1930s.

  The success of French Without Tears established Rattigan’s reputation, but later he began to see it as a millstone. For many years, Rattigan’s plays were judged against this early success: ‘Whatever I did subsequently I was always described as the author of French Without Tears. It took me years and years actually to get the phrase removed from programme notes’.24 The critical responses already cited indicate slightly patronising approval; The Tatler’s reviewer enjoyed what he called ‘less of a play than an entertaining, cleverly observed sketch of youthful outlook’. Ivor Brown, writing in the Observer, felt that ‘the play rattles along, leading nowhere in particular, but never flagging in jovial absurdity’ professing that ‘Mr. Rattigan has been uncommonly well served’ by a company which turned his ‘brief and brittle [play], with little construction and no freshness or fun’ into ‘the agreeable semblance of a really gay comedy’.25

  The play was immediately revived after it closed in the West End, with productions at the Richmond Theatre, Golders Green Hippodrome, ‘Q’ and Embassy Theatres in the same year. There was a European ENSA tour just after the war, with members of the original cast,26 but its first major revival was in 1949, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, directed by Robert Flemyng who also starred as Alan, alongside Moira Lister as Diana and Clive Morton as Rogers. By this time, audiences had seen After the Dance, Flare Path, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and Adventure Story, and Rattigan’s change of direction was evident. The condescension intensified: the Sketch talked of ‘the virtues of this little piece’; the Times suggested that it was ‘only a trifle . . . but it has an air of high spirits and good humour that can still be delightful’; the Daily Herald found it ‘airy fun’ and the Daily Mail ‘a sunny, airy affair’.27 Ironically, then, the play which had hampered Rattigan’s more sombre work would itself become dismissed by this later development.

  The play continued to be revived over the next fifteen years, including productions at the Croydon Grand (1950 and 1954), Camberwell Palace (1951), Brighton Theatre Royal (1956), Nottingham Playhouse (1958), and Sheffield Playhouse (1963). But as with all of Rattigan’s work, the play’s fortunes went into a decline during the sixties, as a new generation of playwrights held Britain’s critical attention.

  It was therefore surprising to some that Frank Dunlop should have chosen, in 1973, to revive French Without Tears at the Young Vic, a fringe theatre associated with younger audiences. It starred Ian Charleson as Brian, Andrew Robertson as Alan, Gavin Reed as Rogers and Mel Martin as Diana. While the Daily Mail reviewer in 1949 could begin a review with the words, ‘Terence Rattigan, today one of our major playwrights . . . ’, no one could do that in 1973.

  And yet the production was an enormous success. Robert Cushman, in the Observer, wrote that ‘the construction is famously adroit, and the writing bubbles. The play richly deserves its audience, which, as usual at this theatre, is predominantly young, and apparently greatly relieved at being allowed to escape from what is generally held to be good for it’. The Sunday Times reviewer described the play as ‘one of the funniest in English literature’, a view echoed by Dunlop who called it ‘one of the best comedies of our epoch’.28

  Coming soon after a revival of While the Sun Shines at Hampstead, the play marked an upturn in Rattigan’s critical reputation, characterised by Charles Lewsen’s remark in the Times that ‘possibly the theatre of the sixties unjustly neglected a fine comic writer’. Rattigan, who went to the first night with Rex Harrison, was very moved by this reappraisal of his reputation: ‘It was quite absurd. There we were with tears streaming down our faces and all around us sat the audience laughing their heads off. But the point was they were so young. Some of them could have been our grandchildren; most of them weren’t even born when the play was first staged. I felt immensely grateful to all of them. We crept out mopping our eyes and feeling absolutely marvellous’.29

  The play has been less frequently revived since then, directors favouring the later Rattigan of the forties and fifties. In 1982, Alan Strachan, who had directed a series of Coward revivals which had been instrumental in reanimating his critical profile, as well as a successful version of The Deep Blue Sea the year before, revived French Without Tears at the Greenwich Theatre. Clive Francis played Rogers, Jane Booker Diana, and Peter Woodward Alan. Although the cast were generally complimented, most reviews registered an unease with what seemed like a curiosity from a forgotten era. ‘Somehow,’ wrote Sheridan Morley in Punch, ‘this curious parable of sexual frigidity and promiscuity is now showing a few hairline cracks,’ and voiced the now routine claim, also alleged by Nicholas de Jongh in the Guardian, that Rattigan’s failure to acknowledge his homosexuality gives his plays a central, structural dishonesty. At best the critics found it ‘a pleasant, diverting evening’ (Time Out), but at worst called it ‘the dated grand-daddy of English sit-coms’ (City Limits). Morley’s view that ‘Rattigan’s comedies are now wearing a lot worse than his dramas’ was widely shared.30

  How does the play look today? John Barber, without elaborating, wrote of the Young Vic revival: ‘So we were not wrong, those of us who remember French Without Tears as delicious and somehow something more than a mere frolic.’ To contemporary eyes, the play may well be said to have dated. We are rightly inclined to take less indulgently the men’s malicious discussion of womanly wiles. It is equally hard to be persuaded of Diana’s fatal attractions. The play remains light, colloquially witty, but, to pursue Barber’s point, is there ‘something more’?

  It may well be the very features that have caused recent reviewers such problems that could commend the play to us. What is particularly striking now is the misogyny of the male characters. Diana is an object of ‘caddish’ derision in the play, referred to a number of times as a ‘bitch’, and the play ends with her humiliation as Lord Heybrook evades her clutches. However, the play does not necessarily endorse this; rather it presents a subtle dramatisation of the tensions within this misogyny. And from this much of the play’s comedy springs.

  For even if we should wish to, it is hard fully to sympathise with these men. Part of the humour lies in the audience’s awareness of how Diana works. Her flirting is utterly transparent, and we laugh at the fact that these men seem so easily taken in. Rogers has been warned that Diana will try to seduce him, but when she makes her first advance he is totally captivated:

  DIANA. . . . Tell me about yourself. Tell me about the Navy. I’m always thrilled to death by anything to do with the sea.

  ROGERS. Really, that’s splendid. (p. 23)

  Similarly, we watch Diana stringing Rogers and Kit along simultaneously, and laugh when she uses exactly the same line to both men and neither of them doubts her sincerity. These moments give us an ironic distance on events like Alan’s seduction. The discrepancy between the men’s description of Diana as this mysterious, seductive huntress and her really rather conspicuous technique creates a space for satirical observation of the mechanics of male attitudes to women. In Act Three, Kit’s attempt to make romantic overtures to Jacqueline by talking about the weather and Alan’s increasingly panicked and farcical attempt
s to avoid being in the same room as Diana make for an emphatic satire of male fears and anxieties.

  Not simply hostile, the men betray a profound ambivalence towards Diana. One of the first things they say about her is that she is not there to learn French but to stop them learning it (p. 11). This immediately establishes a central irony that runs through the play. Most of the men have been sent by their fathers to learn French before taking their exams to enter the Diplomatic service. Yet they all spend the play trying to avoid learning any French. Diana is immediately characterised as someone who both challenges their serious careers and yet makes possible their pleasure.

  Unable to accept responsibility for their resistance to paternal authority, these men displace these desires onto Diana, disavowing any responsibility for them. Their panicked reactions to her advances are in fact fears about the instability of their own resolve, their own desires. This hypocritical move is a difficult one to sustain, and their simultaneous desire and disdain for Diana leads them to ever more violent attempts to dissociate themselves from her. Their characterisation of relations between them and her move from embarrassed allegations that she is ‘rather fast’ (p.12) to describing their defence against her in military terms: confronting Diana, Alan observes his petrified fellow-students and asks, ‘Who is to fire the first shot of the salvo? . . . Very well, I must engage the enemy on your behalf’ (p. 60).

  The conflict between their desires and their fathers’ instructions to work hard is depicted at Maingot’s dinner table, where they attempt to present a serious face while secretly passing notes and planning their leisure time. The serious, tightly-reined image of propriety is indicated through their clothing; while Diana seems entirely comfortable with her body (often making entrances semi-naked), the men wear shapeless clothes, or formal jackets that hide their bodies. Rogers is the clearest example of this neurotically strait-laced, tight-lipped, ship-shape orderliness. Part of Alan’s astonishment at Kit’s decision to take an early dip is no doubt connected with this unmanly exposure of his body; and when Jacqueline tells Diana that Kit has gone upstairs to put some clothes on, she remarks, ‘isn’t that like him’ (p. 21).

  The association between bodily containment and controlling one’s desires is revealed further by a series of fantasies of the disastrous effects of love, which threatens to tear their very bodies apart: Kit accuses Diana of having given him pneumonia after she persuades him to go for an early morning dip: ‘But I don’t mind,’ he adds. ‘You could tear me up in little pieces and trample on them, and I’d still love you’ (p. 19). Alan’s description of Diana’s seduction technique is revealingly couched in metaphors drawn from the blood sports of fishing and stag hunting (pp. 35-36); and when he discovers that Diana may be in love with him, his response is sheer terror: ‘I’m frightened. I’m really frightened. . . . I shall fall. Oh, God! I know it, I shall fall . . . You don’t realise the appalling danger I’m in’ (p. 61).

  To avoid the projected dangers of Diana, the men constantly retreat into apparently non-sexual environments; some of the time they behave like schoolchildren, passing notes in class, inventing outlandish excuses for failing to submit essays, and are referred to as ‘boys’ (e.g., p. 21). Brian, in his visits to prostitutes, tries to reduce his dealings with women to simple economic contracts, for which Alan admires him. But mainly they find refuge in manly comradeship. At the end of the first scene of Act Two, Alan tells Rogers about his novel. It concerns two conscientious objectors who emigrate so as to avoid having to fight in a war, but soon find themselves fighting over a woman. Eventually, they decide to abandon the woman and their principles and go off to war together (p. 41).

  This renunciation of women and celebration of brotherly companionship is not altogether without its problems. The men surround the second main female character, Jacqueline, with another series of strange disavowals. Their friendliness towards her would seem to bear out the passage from La Bruyère that Kit so incompetently and pessimistically translates (‘Friendship can exist between people of different sexes, quite exempt from all grossness,’ p. 27). But the only way these men can sustain a friendship with her is by treating her as ‘one of the boys’. They all call her ‘Jack’, and Kit admits to her, ‘I’ll tell you this, Jack. I like you so much that it’s sometimes quite an effort to remember that you’re a woman at all’ (p. 33).

  But this strategy causes them problems; Jack/Jacqueline crosses the boundary they try rigorously to police between honest male friendship and dangerous sexual desires. When Alan informs Kit that she is in love with him, he is strangely disconcerted: ‘Love and Jack. They just don’t seem to connect. I’m frightfully fond of her, but somehow – I don’t know – I mean you couldn’t kiss her or make love to her’ (p. 62). And at one point, trying to attract Kit, Jacqueline has her hair cut in imitation of Diana. He admits that this makes her look ‘alluring’ and laughs. Pressed for an opinion, he retorts rudely and leaves the room (p. 28). What perhaps disturbs Kit is that their carefully protected male cameraderie may not be quite as non-sexual as they had hoped.

  Through such devices, the play brilliantly anatomises the sexual dynamics of all-male environments. The men’s tortuous attempts to preserve their bodily and sexual integrity is frequently defeated by shrewd ambiguities and tensions. Alan’s description of his ideal woman is that she should not be a ‘cow’ (further abuse of Diana), and also that ‘she will be able to converse freely and intelligently with me on all subjects – Politics – Philosophy – Religion – Thirdly, she will have all the masculine virtues and none of the feminine vices. Fourthly, she will be physically unattractive enough to keep her faithful to me, and attractive enough to make me desire her’ (p. 62). Especially given Alan’s, Kit’s and Rogers’s determination that proper masculine behaviour involves the inflexible application of rationality, this woman who has no power to set man against man begins rather to resemble a man herself.

  Throughout the play, their staunchly masculine comradeship is marked by traces of homoeroticism. Much of the time this means the adoption of a tone of camp badinage: in the first moments of the play we discover that the men refer to each other as ‘Babe’, ‘my dear’, ‘child’ and ‘ducky’ (p. 5), and a sweetly effete stage direction as Alan ‘taps Kenneth on the head with a brioche’ (p. 6).

  The most striking sequence follows these men on the night of the Costume Ball. Under the influence of the festivities, these otherwise unacknowledged forces surface to hilarious effect. Mikhail Bakhtin has written of a history of popular celebration in which hierarchy and order is replaced by a riotous confusion, blurring of boundaries, excess, reversal and laughter. In carnival, he writes, ‘things are tested and re-evaluated in the dimensions of laughter . . . it liberates objects from the snares of false seriousness, from illusions and sublimations inspired by fear’ adding, as just one example, ‘men are transvested as women and vice versa’.31

  The mini-carnival of Le Quartorze, Bastille Day, sees the men throw off their tightly-reined seriousness. The shabby clothes are replaced with a new flamboyance: Kit is wearing the costume of a Greek Evzone, the most notable feature of which is a skirt, beneath which, comically, sock-suspenders can be seen; adopting Rogers’s proper dress, Kenneth wears a sailor suit (the ability of which to emphasise the body is much admired in certain theatrical quarters); and even the ferocious patriarch, Maingot, wears a kilt.

  These costumes have peculiar effects on their wearers’ masculinity; Kit describes himself as looking like an ‘inebriated danseuse’ (p. 47), and Maingot confusing it with a ceilidh, announces his intention to perform a ‘can-can’ (p. 48). The serious dispute between Rogers and Kit over Diana is rendered impossible by the costume:

  ROGERS. (Collapsing, doubled up with laughter, into a chair.) You look so damned funny in that get up.

  KIT. (Looking down at his legs, and beginning to giggle.) A little eccentric, I admit.

  ROGERS. Like a bedraggled old fairy queen.

  KIT. I’ll go and change.<
br />
  ROGERS. (Becoming serious.) No, don’t. If you do I’ll have to fight you. I can’t when you’re looking like that, and if you go on looking like that it’ll save us from making idiots of ourselves. (p. 50)

  So Rogers, the man who felt that fighting for honour is proof of manhood (p. 41), now finds that fighting makes you look ridiculous.

  Their attempts to keep their ‘animal passions’ at bay by reasoning with each other (p. 51) soon evaporate, and, as if cued by the skirt, their comradeship becomes inflected with a camp register that recalls Gwendolen and Cecily from The Importance of Being Earnest.

  KIT. . . . I say, I may call you Bill, mayn’t I?

  ROGERS. Oh, my dear Kit. (p. 53)

  When Alan appears, they describe their new-found friendship almost as if declaring their engagement, and he is soon caught up in the festivity:

  KIT. Don’t call him the Commander, Alan. His name is Bill.

  ALAN. Bill?

  KIT. Yes, Bill. He’s one of the best fellows in the world.

  ROGERS. We’re going to get drunk together, aren’t we, Kit?

  ALAN. Kit?

  KIT. Screaming drunk, Bill.

  ALAN. (Dashing to the door.) I won’t be a minute. (p. 54)

  The playful homoeroticism of this sequence is accentuated in the following scene. As the curtain rises, in a muted take on a post-coital tableau, the men are discovered lounging sleepily on the set, smoking. When Kit threatens to break up this masculine bond, Rogers flirtatiously makes a grab for him: ‘Very well. I have no option but to ask you for your skirt . . . I’ve been longing to get my hands on that damn thing all the evening’ (p. 59). The three men tumble to the floor. Diana’s entrance provokes a witty re-framing that makes it quite clear ‘what this looks like’, a speculation strengthened from within the play by Rogers citing Freud to the effect that love – and possibly friendship – is ‘sublimated sex’ (p. 56). Rattigan’s decision to change Lord Heybrook to a young boy was wise, since having the men laugh complicitly with a blonde queen would have articulated too clearly an unmentionable aspect of their sexual victory.