- Born
- Died
- Birth nameTerence Mervyn Rattigan
- Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London on June 10, 1911,
the son of a career diplomat and serial philanderer whose indiscretions
resulted in his being cashiered by the Foreign Office. As a member of
the lower upper-middle class in the inter-war period, the young
Rattigan received a first-rate education at Harrow and Trinity College,
Oxford. His was a privileged, intellectual background that is reflected
in his plays. For a decade after the Second World War, he was one of
England's leading playwrights, but the eruption of the "kitchen-sink"
school of English drama in the mid-1950s scuttled his critical reputation.
Rattigan achieved his first success as a playwright at age 25 with the
light comedy "French Without Tears" (1936), which was a smash in the
West End. Determined to do more serious work, he wrote the satirical
social drama "After the Dance" in 1939, which skewered the failure of
the class of "Bright Young Things" to prevent another war. The advent
of World War II truncated the play's run, but Rattigan would continue to
taste sweet success for a full generation, alternating between comedies
and dramas.
In the post-war period, he established himself as a major English
dramatist with "The Winslow Boy", "The Browning Version", "The Deep
Blue Sea", and "Separate Tables", all of which were made into successful
motion pictures. A Rattigan play displayed keen craftsmanship and
finely-structured plots; emotion was hidden in the best English
middle-class tradition, but was lurking in the depths. The typical
Rattigan play was a sympathetic, witty study of middle-class people in
emotional distress. There was often a love triangle or a general conflict
in which decent people found themselves embroiled. These characters
sublimated their emotions and passions; the psychic cost of repression
was a focus and theme of Rattigan's work.
Rattigan's themes were personal: the illogicality of love; the conflict
between idealized love and love as realized in the here and now; the pain
of lost promise; and the defeat of potential greatness by human weakness.
The themes and leitmotifs in Rattigan's plays were found beneath the
surface; nothing was worn on the sleeve. They were elucidated by the
playwright's craft, through a well-constructed story and skillfully-observed
characters.
According to Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell, he had learned how
to mask his feelings from his father, whose multiple love affairs, carried on
in secret behind his wife's back, appalled his son. Also, Terence was a
homosexual in an era rife with anti-gay sentiment; the persecution of those
suffering from what was once termed "inversion" was all too real.
Rattigan lived behind a mask (he was very discreet about his own same-sex
affairs), as did the characters in his plays. Emotions were buried lest their display
cause even more pain, or scandal. Wansell believes that his reticence stemmed
from a deeply-rooted aversion to emotional engagement. "Behind the apparently
carefree mask lived a man crying out to be loved and appreciated," Wansell wrote,
"but a man who was also incapable of demonstrating that need."
For a run of almost five straight years in the 1940s, Rattigan had plays appearing
simultaneously on the boards of three adjacent West End theaters. In 1956 the
English stage was revolutionized by
John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," in which emotions were (in the parlance
of a later generation) allowed to "all hang out." Overnight, Rattigan's dreams of
emotional repression were deemed old-fashioned. Dramatists, directors, and actors
who stuck with the old "well-crafted", more subtle paradigm of drama were also
deemed "old-fashioned" and suffered a professional eclipse.
(Laurence Olivier, who had starred in
Rattigan plays and movies made from his work, kept himself relevant by offering
himself to Osborne, who crafted "The Entertainer" for him. It would be many years
before his contemporaries
John Gielgud and
Ralph Richardson would make it
out of the woods, outside of Shakespeare, in terms of contemporary
drama. They appeared together in
Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" 20 years
after the changing of the guard).
"Look Back in Anger" was a cultural broadside against everything the
Establishment represented, and Rattigan was very much part of that
Establishment. In the introduction to his collected plays, published in
1959, Rattigan wrote of an archetypal playgoer, "Aunt Edna," whom he
characterized as a "nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden
lady" to whom playwrights had to be responsive as she was the person
who spent her money to go to the theater. What Rattigan was trying to
say is that the theater must be responsive to its audience; to the new
Turks, many of whom would later thrive in non-commercial,
state-subsidized theater. Rattigan was a shameless old fart, pandering
to the very class of people, the Aunt Ednas and the Miss Grundys, whom
they despised and whose tastes, and the drama and comedies written to
suit those tastes, debased the theater as an art form.
Rattigan's reputation declined and, overnight, his plays were derided by the
critics. A very sensitive man who had a terrible fear of failure, Rattigan's
confidence declined along with his critical reputation. He retaliated the new
kitchen-sink school in interviews and via dialogue in his new plays, with the
result that he underscored the new generation's contempt of him. Rattigan
transformed himself into a caricature of the kind of playwright the new
English theater was rebelling against: conservative, staid, old-fashioned,
valuing craft above feeling, with no empathy for the modern world or for
the majority of Britons. To them, he represented the complacency of a
moribund Tory- and toff-dominated Britain that was no longer relevant
after the Suez debacle of 1956.
Truthfully, among the post-1956 Rattigan plays are some of his finest
work, including "Ross," "Man and Boy," and "Cause Celebre," but it didn't
matter to the critics: he was considered hopelessly passé. Like the post-
"The Night of the Iguana" Tennessee Williams, he was cruelly
discarded as a contemporary artist of any relevance. He was a phantom
of a past that vanished with Britain's world-power status after Suez.
Rattigan was first diagnosed with leukemia in 1962; it went into remission
in 1964, but he suffered a relapse in 1968. Despising the "Mod" Britain of
the 1960s, he moved to Bermuda. In that decade he supported himself by
writing screenplays, and for a while he enjoyed the status as the world's
highest-paid screenwriter. He was knighted in 1972 and moved back to
England. His critical reputation saw a minor revival shortly before his death
from cancer in 1977, and a major revival in the early 21st century after
Karel Reisz staged a revival of "The Deep Blue Sea." Although he
was never as successful in the United States as he was in Britain, Rattigan is
increasingly being viewed in his homeland as one of the 20th century's finest
playwrights.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
- RelativesHealy Lange(Aunt or Uncle)
- He was educated at Harrow School.
- Was nominated for Broadway's 1957 Tony Award as author of Best Play
nominee "Separate Tables." - His play The Deep Blue Sea is based on the suicide of his former lover Kenneth Morgan.
- His play, "Flare Path," at the Griffin Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2013 Non-Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Play Production.
- He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1958 Queen's Birthday Honours List and made a Knight Bachelor in the 1971 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to the theatre.
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