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The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.37.2.0338

1529-1480

Sally Peters,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright argues for the exceptional quality of Rattigan's drama, its place in dramatic history having fluctuated from marked success to steep decline to robust recovery. In his book, part of the ongoing Palgrave Macmillan series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, edited by Peter Gahan and Nelson Ritschel, John Bertolini sets out to give some sense of “the literary pleasure to be found in reading, hearing, and seeing, but especially in reading, the plays of Terrence Rattigan as part of the history of dramatic literature” (vii). Bertolini writes with a clarity and quiet assurance that belies the substrata of charged claims and revelations, for although some might find hyperbolic Peter O'Toole's assertion that Rattigan is “the best playwright of the twentieth century,” this assertion is exactly what Bertolini seeks to show—that is, his “case” (vii).To accomplish his ends, Bertolini moves chronologically through the oeuvre, reading closely and providing detailed analyses of key scenes from early to late. Additionally, he examines Rattigan's use of classical sources and playwrights, from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Shaw and Wilde. Crucial to his method is showing how Rattigan's art of understatement and implication functions in his drama, producing an achievement Bertolini calls unique in dramatic literature.Even though Rattigan achieved early commercial success, by midcentury the Angry Young Men movement seemed to relegate his art to the past. Drawing room decorum and quietly suffering characters appeared to be no match for the violent language, explosive aggression, and naturalistic detail that John Osborne ushered in with Look Back in Anger. Seizing the opportunity when introducing a volume of Noel Coward's plays, Rattigan, in effect, offered a defense of his own work, insisting that it is really “the gentler emotions—pity, compassion, nostalgia, love, regret—that are likely to inspire the most worthwhile drama. Anger rarely breeds understanding, and without understanding a play becomes too subjective to make good drama” (2). Elsewhere, he articulated his strategy as identifying the “most vital problems of the whole craft of playwriting—what not to have your actors say, and how best to have them not say it” (56). Such an approach is meant to forge a collaboration with the audience so they recognize aspects of the characters more from what is not spoken than from what is voiced. Rattigan's gift is to convey through a word or phrase what Bertolini calls “significant movements in the human soul” (8).Using subtext as a way to extract affect is, of course, antithetical to Shaw's creation of highly self-conscious and articulate characters. Shaw's advice to Ralph Richardson rehearsing the role of Bluntschil in Arms and the Man highlights this difference: “You've got to go from line to line, quickly and swiftly, never stop the flow of lines, never stop. It's one joke after another, it's a firecracker. Always reserve the acting for underneath the spoken word” (20). In Shaw's dramatic universe, there is no time to stop for implication. Similarly in the preface to Saint Joan, Shaw notes that he has Warwick and Cauchon say “the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing” (20).Since Rattigan viewed plays as a vehicle for universal but gentler emotions and rejected using plays as a vehicle for ideas or political causes, it is perhaps understandable that his view of Shaw was ambivalent. In 1950, he entered into a two-month-long debate with the nonagenarian Shaw and others in the pages of the New Statesman and Nation concerning the Play of Ideas. During the exchange, Rattigan misrepresented Shaw, who remained respectful despite having his drama considered the equivalent of Propagandistic Plays. Rattigan also misrepresented Shaw's view of Shakespeare, accusing Shaw of condemning Shakespeare as the “arch-enemy of his own pet theory of drama,” conveniently ignoring Shaw's profound appreciation of Shakespeare, noting only his campaign against the extravagant Shakespeare worship that he labeled Bardolatry (29).Rattigan's debt to Shaw can be seen in French Without Tears. It has traces of Candida, a play that Rattigan much admired as a drama of character and situation. Its treatment of sexual shyness, pain, and shame in the subplot makes it Shaw's most Rattiganesque play.1 However more influential to French Without Tears was Man and Superman, which is suggested via a reversed love chase with a protesting hero that recalls Tanner, although Rattigan's version of Ann—Diana—is more obviously a huntress. Rattigan inserts a homoerotic subtext as the characters Kit and Roger first quarrel over Diana, then find consolation in one another's company.Shaw is infused into the fabric of Ross, the tale of T. E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia. The play's title derives from the name the famed military man used to enlist anonymously. Once discovered, he used the name “Shaw” to reenlist. Shaw's name is cited several times during the action, and the last scene of the play owes something to the last scene of Saint Joan. Rattigan's interest in Lawrence involved what the playwright took to be Lawrence's unrecognized homosexuality.At the core of Rattigan's drama lies what remains unspoken, preventing true emotional intimacy. Unable to overcome fear or shame to speak directly, Rattigan's characters turn to various forms of writing. They read letters aloud, translate passages from another language, recite poetic lines and fragments, thereby communicating obliquely. For example, The Deep Blue Sea is structured on multiple references to the written word, including a suicide note. Indeed, several of Rattigan's tragic plays “can be read as suicide notes” (133), and Bertolini postulates that Rattigan “converses with himself throughout The Deep Blue Sea about his own life and his art of writing plays” (136).Crucial to understanding Rattigan and his art is The Browning Version, which is based on the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a play that inspired Rattigan to become a playwright. It is “perhaps the greatest play ever written” asserts Classics master Andrew Crocker-Harris, who fills both the role of the scapegoat in classical tragedy and the recurring role of the wounded or impotent Rattigan male hero (107). Here his wound is his homosexuality. Crocker-Harris defines his problem with his wife as “Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart, as I know now.” These words of “an irreconcilable duality” are expressed in “absolutist antithetical sentence structure” (104). As in French Without Tears, Rattigan's men turn to each other after failed relationships with women, unable to combine physical with spiritual love.Although Rattigan began by writing comedy, his vision darkened into tragedy as he depicted the ubiquitous intermingling of victory and defeat. In dramatizing the desperation and humiliation he saw as defining the human condition, he created characters suffering from personal defeat and sexual uneasiness. These desolate characters show Rattigan displaying an ability to write pathos that Bertolini sees as reigning virtually unchallenged among twentieth-century dramatists. At the center of many Rattigan plays is the innocent who appears guilty, with Rattigan acting as the defense attorney presenting the case, as in Cause Célèbre, The Winslow Boy, and Separate Tables. “It is perhaps too obvious that the roots of Rattigan's fascination with this pattern of the accused and reviled individual who turns out to be not guilty and not vile lie in his feelings about homosexuality in general and himself as a homosexual in particular, as if he pleads: I—we—are not the guilty creatures you see us as” (209). At times deceptive about his sexuality, Rattigan was accused of an unsympathetic portrayal of homosexuality in Variation on a Theme and attacked for his alleged dishonesty in depicting homosexual characters.The book concludes with the courtroom case dramatized in Cause Célèbre, Rattigan's final play revisiting many of his obsessive themes, especially regarding sexuality. A brief paragraph at chapter's end is offered as an afterword. There is no fiery courtroom finale summing up Rattigan's “case.” But I do wonder, are we then to infer that Rattigan is the best playwright because implication is the supreme dramatic skill and he practices it so well, implication taking precedence over, say, verbal and intellectual brilliance (Shaw) or technical innovation (Brecht) or psychological observation (Pirandello)? Do Rattigan's themes of incompatible sexuality arising out of his own biography somehow come into play in ranking him?2With his lucid, nuanced analyses, Bertolini reveals and explains Rattigan's artistry. This thoughtful book serves both as a study of the playwright and as a manual on reading and understanding drama—useful to students, actors, and directors alike.