The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright

John A. Bertolini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319409979
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book asserts the extraordinary quality of mid-twentieth century playwright Terence Rattigan's dramatic art and its basis in his use of subtext, implication, and understatement. By discussing every play in chronological order, the book also articulates the trajectory of Rattigan's darkening vision of the human potential for happiness from his earlier comedies through his final plays in which death appears as a longed for peace. New here is the exploration through close analysis of Rattigan's style of writing dialogue and speeches, and how that style expresses Rattigan's sense of life. Likewise, the book newly examines how Rattigan draws on sources in Greek and Roman history, literature, and myth, as well as how he invites comparison with the work of other playwrights, especially Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare. It will appeal broadly to college and university students studying dramatic literature, but also and especially to actors and directors, and the play-going, play-reading public.

© The Author(s) 2016

John A. BertoliniThe Case for Terence Rattigan, PlaywrightBernard Shaw and His Contemporaries10.1007/978-3-319-40997-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Terence Rattigan’s Art of Understatement and Implication

John A. Bertolini¹

(1)

Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, USA

End Abstract

The most remarkable thing about Terence Rattigan as a playwright is not the oft-praised (and oft-lamented) theatrical craft of his plays, nor their huge commercial success, nor even the drama of his reputation’s decline in the wake of the Angry Young Man movement and his subsequent rehabilitation; it is rather that from his first play, French Without Tears, to his last play, Cause Célèbre, Rattigan consistently maintained an extraordinary level of dramatic art. Rattigan’s dramatic powers neither wax nor wane. Individual plays are better than other individual plays, but he suffers no period of decline in his artistic skill. Occasionally he oddly misfires, for example, Before Dawn; he produced one near failure, Variations on a Theme, and one perhaps less consequential play, Who is Sylvia?; apart from these, however, every one of Rattigan’s plays displays the same high level of achievement. Each offers moment to moment more authentic dramatic feeling because of his ability to write dialogue that matches perfectly the characters and incidents represented than can be found in the whole output of other playwrights.

The year 1956 did not presage a secure or successful future for Terence Rattigan. For, although he was writing dramatic dialogue of such elegant power, that is, profoundly affecting through a minimum of words, and imagining dramatic situations that expressed perfectly his characteristic music of victories that are so small or so costly that they feel like defeats, or apparent defeats that contain a small victory, the political and critical atmosphere in Britain was turning against him. John Osborne and the other angry young men waiting in line behind him had no time for the sergeants of decorum, or patience, or a drama of quiet understatement. They demanded a drama that showed in naturalistic detail the ugliness, cruelty, hypocrisy, and grayness of the world they resented, a drama that spoke a rhetoric of aggression and a language that could be heard on the street rather than in a drawing room. Now it was at this particular moment that Terence Rattigan was invited to contribute an introduction to a volume commemorating Noel Coward’s contribution to the theater. So it was a moment when Rattigan was looking forward in anger while simultaneously looking backward in admiration.

He expressed his anger thus:

The more turbulent emotions are not always conducive to the best work. Despite the recent prevalence of “angry” plays by “angry” young men, I have always held the, perhaps, prejudiced view that it is really the gentler emotions—pity, compassion, nostalgia, love, regret—that are likely to inspire the most worthwhile and durable drama. Anger rarely breeds understanding, and without understanding a play becomes too subjective to make good drama. Exciting, perhaps, at its immediate impact; but forgotten soon afterwards. ¹

Clearly, Rattigan saw himself writing not out of a particular historical period, or about particular social issues or political causes, but objectively about universal emotions in plays that were meant not to be “forgotten soon afterwards.” He realized how vulnerable his plays would be in comparisons to the “exciting” and “angry” plays of his younger contemporaries with their aesthetic of “immediate impact.” For that reason he turns his admiring gaze toward the past, but ongoing also, achievements of Noel Coward as a writer of drama and praises in Coward’s writing what also distinctively characterizes his own dramatic writing. In making the case for Coward, Rattigan also makes the case for his own plays. He quotes one of Gary Esendine’s speeches (from the third act of Present Laughter) and praises it as follows:

The aspiring playwright would do well to read this speech to himself aloud and to use his reaction to it as a touchstone of his own sense of theatre. If at the end of it he feels no more than that it is a reasonably well-phrased prose passage, and is blind to its theatrical brilliance, its use of words as stage music—“lachrymose, amorous hangovers”—the exact spacing and timing of the laughs, and the superbly skillful comic climax of “apple and a good book”, if he be blind to all this, then let him throw away his pen for ever, or just become a novelist. ²

What Rattigan praises here in Coward points to exactly what Rattigan knows himself to possess—the gift of styling and structuring a character’s voice and speech in such a way as to control the audience’s attention to, identification with, and reaction to the character speaking. That is, a character has a rhythm in thinking and speaking that the dramatist creates and controls. But the dramatist also steers the audience’s response to the speech by shaping the contours of the audience’s parallel ride so that the audience reaches the “superbly skillful comic climax of ‘apple and a good book’” (two trochees and a spondee) with a resounding appreciation of Gary Essendine’s assertiveness. Rattigan here claims for the dramatist a unique skill, creating a character by means of voice alone, hence the bravado of his dismissal of novelists as playwrights manqués.

I begin to survey the range of Rattigan’s dramatic powers with two moments from Adventure Story, probably his least valued great play. The opening scene, which Rattigan calls a prologue, depicts a dying Alexander being urged by his generals to choose a successor. Only Rattigan would begin the story of one who conquered all at the moment he loses all. Perdiccas, one of Alexander’s generals, approaches the sickbed and tries to get him to speak, but Alexander’s speech fails; silence responds to Perdiccas. Perdiccas tries again, louder, and again is met by silence. The rhythm here of effort, failure of effect, renewed effort, followed by renewal of failure, expresses the basic beat of Rattigan’s quiet music of humanity. ³ Perdiccas asks Alexander to “make a sign” if he understands. All Alexander can do is raise his hand a little above his coverlet. Such stage images of corporeal weakness strike the true Rattigan note. Perdiccas urges him to name his successor. No response. Perdiccas urges him again. Alexander’s hands continue to move, but neither Perdiccas nor Ptolemy, another of Alexander’s generals, knows how to interpret his gesture. Ptolemy now leans in to see if he can hear whether Alexander actually says anything. He thinks Alexander has said something, and Perdiccas declares that Alexander’s “lips moved….” Each in turn asks him to repeat what he said. They are not emotionally affected by the situation. They want only to learn who will be Alexander’s successor. They do not succeed in that wish. Their businesslike inquisitiveness and indifference to the pitiableness of Alexander provides quintessential Rattiganesque irony. No histrionics or raised voices, just the total defeat of a great man, with his psychological state unknown even to those companions nearest to him.

Besides establishing a characteristic atmosphere of futility, Rattigan also shows in this prologue his skill in grasping and guiding the attention and interest of the audience. For the question has been raised: who will succeed in ruling the largest empire then known? Ptolemy, as he and Perdiccas rise from their positions, kneeling at Alexander’s bedside, tries to puzzle out what Alexander might have said: “He certainly said something.” Again there is no excitement here, no urgency, only the irony of the uncomprehending trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Ptolemy goes on: “It sounded almost like ‘Who shall I condemn to death?’” (I: 454)

And Perdiccas responds, “Something like that.” Neither of them has any sense of what those words mean, only of something like what they might mean, which of course augments the audience’s understanding of the profound sorrow in which imperial power concludes. Immediately Ptolemy and Perdiccas turn to what they know best, practical measures. To quiet the army, the leaders decide to have the soldiers parade past Alexander’s deathbed so that they may say farewell to their king. As the soldiers in succession salute Alexander, the audience hears Alexander first wish that he could have died in battle, then ponder whether there was a point at which he could have turned back, and finally question: “Where did it first go wrong?” (I: 455)

Such a question defines the dramatic world of Rattigan’s characters. So many of his protagonists search their hearts for the answer to that question, whether Andrew Crocker-Harris, Hester Collyer, T. E. Lawrence (“Ross”), Gregor Antonescu, Emma Hamilton, or Alma Rattenbury. Each finds him- or herself at a point in their lives when they have already lost everything, or at least have been defeated; each makes an attempt to hold on to what has already been lost or to turn their defeat into a small victory. As Rattigan’s playwriting career progresses, the earlier small victories and little redemptions give way to total failure and resigned surrender. Where Hester Collyer succeeds in cheating suicide through artistic pursuit, Alma Rattenbury in Rattigan’s last play, Cause Célèbre, succeeds in killing herself. “Thank God for peace at last” is her last line (II: 729). In Ross, Lawrence of Arabia may not even hear the last line spoken in the play: “God will give you peace” (II: 323). For Rattigan’s defeated heroes and heroines, the only real peace is death.

Adventure Story ends with Alexander’s last thoughts, unheard by the other characters. He answers his own despairing question about whom to name as his successor—“Who shall I condemn to death?”—with “No one.” He considers it his “last act of mercy” to “let them fight it out for themselves.” His final line produces the authentic Rattigan cadence of defeat: “The adventure is over, and the adventurer would like to go to sleep” (I: 517). The tone of self-irony the word adventurer acquires by virtue of its flat, weary repetitiveness, as if it were collapsing adventure and over into one word out of a failure of energy, also derives from its being a four-syllable word in a sentence of mostly single-syllable words, giving it a pretentious, faintly ridiculous, sadly absurd quality. Alexander was defeated before he started. Moreover, in 1949, the word adventurer would have retained its connotation of a cheap confidence man, hinting at a tinge of self-contempt in Alexander’s tone.

The second scene from Adventure Story that illustrates Rattigan’s dramatic skill also exemplifies the theme of always being defeated already, but in this instance through Darius (Act I, sc. 2). The royal family of Persia has gathered itself into a corner of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, where Darius reads to them from a dispatch the news of Alexander’s having cut the Gordian Knot, an event Darius looks upon variously as “wonderful insolence,” “interesting,” “rather charming,” and “old-world bravado” (I: 462). Darius’s general, Bessus, on the other hand, also sees it as “dangerous.” The Queen Mother, like her son Darius, takes a patronizing but also petulantly dismissive view of Alexander as a “barbarian.” Midway through the scene, she suggests that Alexander cannot get through the Cilician Gates and that, not being able to do so, he will get tired and go home. Following her somewhat smug suggestion, Rattigan carefully distracts the audience from the image of the Cilician Gates, which Alexander could not possibly breach. Rattigan distracts us with conversation about Roxana’s pet lion cub, Marduk, about whether Bessus will bring along a young lady to perform “secretarial work and that sort of thing”—all very much in the Shavian manner, with historical personages speaking in smart modern language, but especially Shavian when Darius comes to describe the Greeks as a politically backward civilization because they have not advanced from democratic city-states to the form of government by which Persia prevents civil wars: empire. Rattigan appears most Shavian (specifically modeling Darius on Shaw’s Caesar, who preferred making friends and allies of his enemies rather than killing them) when he has the Queen Mother urge that she would kill Alexander were he captured, and Darius comments that he would not do so but rather would make a friend of Alexander.

In the midst of this charming conversation, conducted in an elegant, polite manner, as Rattigan’s public might imagine an idealized King George and Queen Mary talking at home with their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, a dispatch is delivered, silently, to Darius, who, while expatiating on the aesthetic value of Greek architecture, looks over the content of the dispatch, only to break off his conversation. Rattigan inserts a pause. The Queen Mother (of course) asks, “What is it, Darius?” Rattigan inserts a long pause. Darius replies straightforwardly that Alexander has “broken through the Cilician Gates” (I: 464). Rattigan inserts a third pause. Rattigan uses the image of the Cilician Gates to stand for the easily breached smug confidence of the weak Persian royal family and masterfully has let them hover behind the facile conversation ready to swing open with the forecast of their defeat. Or, to put it another way, Rattigan shows us a Darius always already defeated, just as his adversary Alexander is. Rattigan does this by means of the simple sentence “He’s broken through the Cilician Gates.” The language does not explode into rhetoric; Darius does not spring into action, banging a gong and summoning his war council. Instead, there is a pause. Rattigan’s characters have their epiphanies in the interstices of the dialogue; the explosion of realization comes in the audience’s imagination because of the elegant way Rattigan has constructed the scene, so that the six-word sentence “He’s broken through the Cilician Gates” will have maximum impact.

The only compensation that life affords us against the sense of being always already defeated Rattigan finds in moments of human compassion when we are able to break through our sense of duty or loyalty to rules and codes. Cause Célèbre offers a superb example of Rattigan’s ability to dramatize such a moment, which he does not by having the character articulate a changed attitude but by having the character’s tone and manner change without explanation. In the middle of Act I, Alma Rattenbury, who has been remanded for trial for being an accessory in the murder of her older, invalid husband by her young lover, George Wood, meets her new wardress, Joan Webster, whom Rattigan describes as “a gruff-voiced, rather forbidding woman” (II: 682).

The wardress’s first words to Alma are that she did not give her permission to sit. Alma, who for Rattigan embodies flawed, pitiable, loving humanity, tries to access some sort of fellow-human feeling in the wardress by asking her name, only to receive the reply “Wardress Webster.” When Alma explains that she meant the wardress’s Christian name, the wardress rebuffs her: “We are not allowed to use Christian names.” Alma tries again to make some human contact by asserting that her previous wardress, Phyllis, did allow it, only to be told, “Well, she should not have.” Alma continues to try to establish some kind of immediate, malleable human contact, but Wardress Webster keeps throwing up one rigid barrier after another between them: from not responding at all, through refusals to respond based on a desire not to speculate on the grounds of not being allowed to answer personal questions, and finally to expressing a preference for abiding by rules. In other words, Wardress Webster practices the fine art of officiousness with relentless will power. The rhythm of the whole dialogue alternates between a human gesture by Alma and a stop signal by Webster.

Throughout the dialogue Rattigan has cunningly concealed from us (as from Alma) Webster’s first name, Joan. Now Rattigan creates an episode between Alma and her lawyers that echoes the preceding scene in its pattern of an attempt to break down barriers between human beings followed by a rigid maintenance of such barriers, only here it is Alma who throws up the barriers. In her determination to take responsibility for the murder of her husband, she continues insisting to her lawyers that she and she alone committed the murder. We see her struggling with her conscience; we see her agony as she improvises one feeble lie after another in order to conceal George’s commission of the crime. The lawyers only succeed in breaking down her defense when the younger (and handsomer) of the two lawyers describes the actual effects of the mallet blows on her husband’s skull. Alma’s affection for her murdered husband and her ample humanity overwhelm her with grief, and she loses control of herself. When Wardress Webster re-enters, at first she maintains her officious comportment with Alma, but as she sees the degree of Alma’s remorse and the intensity of her suffering, we see her step by step climb over the barriers she had placed between herself and Alma. First Wardress Webster offers Alma a handkerchief, then tells her to keep it. Wardress Webster now “proffers” Alma a cigarette and then solicits from Alma the source of her grief—this is the first time she has made any verbal gesture to Alma that was not in response or reaction to something Alma had said or done—“What is it?” (II: 687) As ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Terence Rattigan’s Art of Understatement and Implication
• 2. French Without Tears: Rattigan’s Shavian Inheritance
• 3. After the Dance: Slow Suicide and Quick
• 4. Flare Path: Trapped Words as Mines
• 5. The Winslow Boy: Let Right Be Done
• 6. The Comedies: Until They Became Impossible
• 7. The Browning Version: Words Could So Lacerate a Man’s Heart
• 8. Adventure Story: “I Must Die”
• 9. The Deep Blue Sea: Venus Loses Adonis
• 10. Separate Tables: Every Man an Island
• 11. Ross and Man and Boy: The Vision Darkens
• 12. Bequest to the Nation: “She Cried from Deep, Deep Down in Herself”
• 13. In Praise of Love: Hiding Mortality in Plain Sight
• 14. Cause Célèbre: “Thank God for Peace at Last”
• Backmatter