Terence Rattigan

Sir Terence Rattigan

Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan (10 June 1911 – 30 November 1977) was an English dramatist and screenwriter. His plays include French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables, all of which have been filmed. Like other proponents of the well-made play he fell out of fashion with the coming of the Angry young men and the kitchen sink drama.

Quotes

  • Kenneth: If you’re so hot, you'd better tell me how to say she has ideas above her station.
    Brian: Oh, yes, I forgot. It's fairly easy, old boy. Elle a des idées au-dessus de sa gare.
    • French Without Tears, Act I. (1937).
  • When you're between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting.
    • The Deep Blue Sea, Act I. (1952).
  • Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she "does know what she likes". Let us call her Aunt Edna.
    • The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953) vol. 1, p. xi.
  • A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
  • Do you know what le vice Anglais – the English vice – really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty – whatever the French believe it to be. It's our refusal to admit to our emotions. We think they demean us, I suppose.
    • In Praise of Love, Act II. (1973).

Quotes about Terence Rattigan

  • His best works will long be studied as models of playwriting and also as mirrors of the times. Rattigan can capture the social outlook of a whole period in Cause Célèbre (or the cause célèbre of The Winslow Boy). He can plumb the depths of obsessions rampant in a sedate residential hotel near Bournemouth, a crummy North London flat, a Public School, the active lives of Alexander the Great or T. E. Lawrence or Lord Nelson, the twisted lives of a financier with a charming but weak son or a rapacious woman out to snare her fifth and richest man who falls prey (willingly, self-destructively) to an ambiguous little ballet dancer. Variations on a Theme (whose plot is the last of those situations mentioned) is closely based on Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias – but it is based on a steady and shrewd observation of English life in Rattigan's own time.
    • Leonard R. N. Ashley, 'Rattigan, Sir Terence (Mervyn)', in James Vinson (ed.), Great Writers of the English Language: Dramatists (1979), p. 490
  • Undoubtedly, Rattigan can capture the surface of life; many critics would add that he is all surface, that his works lack profundity. I do not think this charge of superficiality can be made to stick. What is true is that Rattigan's scope is narrow, but where he touches he goes very deep. What he does delve into he will not abandon until he has explored the very depths, and what he finds there he brings to the audience with some reticence but unalloyed honesty. He can make golly funny and pathos poignant and what some would dismiss as "a purely theatrical experience" deeply moving and quite unforgettable.
    • Leonard R. N. Ashley, 'Rattigan, Sir Terence (Mervyn)', in James Vinson (ed.), Great Writers of the English Language: Dramatists (1979), p. 490
  • It was often assumed that Rattigan was simply a purveyor of good middlebrow entertainment... Yet his whole world is a sustained assault on English middle-class values: fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex. In fact, few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan.
    • Michael Billington, The Guardian (1 December 1977), quoted in Amnon Kabatchnik, Blood on the Stage, 1925–1950: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection: An Annotated Repertoire (2010), p. 704
  • He appeared to be a complete model of the conforming upper-class Englishman just as his works appear to be perfect specimens of the well-made play, in reality he was not in the least conforming...there was a deeply Proustian ambivalence at the heart of him.
    • Anthony Curtis, 'Professional Man and Boy', Plays and Players, Vol. 25 (February 1978), p. 23
  • Consider Separate Tables. Here, most notably, in all the goings-on concerning an unhappy army officer, the many gifts bestowed on Rattigan by providence are on parade, his humour, his integrity—above all, his compassion. There is not one character who does not speak true. There is not one sentiment expressed which is not grounded in humanity, not one line that, in any way, diminishes the dignity of man. And, as for the compassion, that most Christian of all Christian virtues, it is there in such full measure that no member of the audience, unless his heart be made of stone, will go into the street at curtain-fall, without a lift in spirit and a fuller understanding of mankind as his companion. That is Rattigan's achievement and his triumph. That, so long as theatres exist and players strut their hour upon the stage and speak the dialogue he wrote for them, is his eternal monument.
    • William Douglas-Home, article in The Sunday Telegraph, quoted in William Douglas-Home, 'Rattigan, Sir Terence Mervyn', The Dictionary of National Biography, 1971–1980, eds. Lord Blake and C. S. Nicholls (1986), pp. 706-707
  • I suppose out of that brilliant playboy talent have come two important plays, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea. The rest seem to me full of moral evasions. Perhaps any homosexual dramatist who, during a time of secrecy and blackmail, presented his own emotional life in his work as if he were a woman, suffered some terrible disability. Tennessee Williams was the most successful, but then he is woman right through. I think the problem with Rattigan was that even if he had had that opportunity for frankness, his whole repressed class background, the stiff upper lip of Harrow, would have made it impossible for him. Deception and restraint are at the very heart of that kind of Englishman. I suppose it's at the heart of me, heterosexual as I am.
    • Peter Hall, diary entry (4 August 1979), quoted in Peter Hall's Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle, ed. John Goodwin (1983), p. 456
  • [Terence Rattigan] had the greatest natural talent for the stage of any man this century.
    • Harold Hobson, obituary of Rattigan in The Sunday Times, quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (1979; rev. ed. 2010), p. 468
  • French execrable: theatre-sense first class.
    • Mr. Laborde, Rattigan's French master at Harrow on Rattigan's French play he had written when he was 14, quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (1979; rev. ed. 2010), p. 43
  • A critic has a duty to ignore anything happening off stage, and to make no allowances for any shortcomings that may result... All the same, I am at any rate partly human, and it would be absurd, as well as impossible, for me to persuade myself that I do not know that Terence Rattigan has for the last couple of years been staring into the eyes of the old gentleman with the scythe... So I am doubly delighted to say that Cause Célèbre (Her Majesty's) betrays no sign of failing powers; on the contrary it could almost herald a new direction for Sir Terence, and a most interesting one, too.
    • Bernard Levin, 'Rattigan's Act of Defiance', The Sunday Times (10 July 1977), quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (1979; rev. ed. 2010), p. 463
  • It's the most amazing story and there is something extraordinarily real about the play. Why is the insight into the fear and terror so authentic? Because Rattigan lived it. The language of stiff upper lip and the understatement of wartime bravery is utterly authentic because it was what he knew and heard all around him in 1941.
  • Their great success is in articulating the anxieties of difference, of the will to fit in, to be ordinary; and of a corresponding desire to be extraordinary, to be different, to be individual. It is this tension that has enabled these works to transcend the trappings of their period, which had been much of their original attraction for my grandmother in the 1940s and 1950s, and to resonate emotionally for me today.
    • Sean O'Connor, Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan (1998; 2016), p. 218
  • The critics do talk a lot of rubbish about craftsmanship because it's something they don't understand at all... The fact is that Terence Rattigan's craftsmanship is like a carriage clock. They can see the insides and the workings of it, so it makes them feel more comfortable. They think: "Oh, yes, I see, that's what he's going to do next — very good!" — And so he gets ten out of ten all the time, quite rightly.
    • John Osborne, Terence Rattigan, A Tribute, BBC Television (2 December 1977), quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (1979; rev. ed. 2010), p. 469
  • I detect in his plays a deep personal, surely sexual, pain, which he manages at the same time to express and disguise. The craftsmanship of which we hear so much loose talk seems to me to arise from deep psychological necessity, a drive to organise the energy that arises out of his own pain... I think Rattigan is not at all the commercial middlebrow dramatist his image suggests but someone peculiarly haunting and oblique who certainly speaks to me with resonance of existential bleakness and irresoluble carnal solitude.
    • David Rudkin to Anthony Curtis, quoted in Anthony Curtis, 'Professional Man and Boy', Plays and Players, Vol. 25 (February 1978), p. 23
  • They are characterized by a refinement of mind and style that time is already beginning to prove are more than English public-school virtues and sleek techniques, as his strongest attackers claimed. Kenneth Tynan's labeling of him as the Formosa of the British theater and then Rattigan's subsequent creation of Aunt Edna, as well as his self-instituted debate in a "battle of the theatres," hounded him throughout most of his career. Yet, in what Hilary Spurling described as that "tricky but crucial (and so far almost wholly neglected) stretch of contemporary theatrical history when the stage became society's distorting mirror," Rattigan occupies a prominent place as the "oblique and delicate playwright of inarticulacy, repression, self-punishment, above all the damage people do to themselves."
    • Susan Rusinko, Terence Rattigan (1983), pp. 151-152
  • Each of his dramas is a progressive refinement of that sense of theater of which he spoke so frequently, a sense which insisted on the duality of the playwright as both writer and audience. The loss of touch with the audience which characterized the dramatic experimentation in the revolutionary stage events since 1956 was caused to a certain degree by the elitism of many of the changes. Rattigan never lost touch. To move an audience to laughter and to tears, rather than to confusion or puzzlement, was always his primary goal, and he consistently maintained sight of that goal. Of his contemporary dramatists, he alone survived the upheavals of the 1950s with his traditional approach which renewed itself in his stage comeback of 1970. And before the experimental waves subsided into the mainstream of theater history, Rattigan once more became a part of that stream. His comedies, history plays, and moving dramas about flawed or failed characters course their way unerringly down the moral and emotional mainstream of their troubled times.
    • Susan Rusinko, Terence Rattigan (1983), p. 152
  • The fact that he never felt able to write directly about his own homosexuality, taken by some to be a mark of dishonesty or cowardice, actually adds an extra level of hurt to his work.
    • Charles Spencer, review of Cause Célèbre in The Daily Telegraph, quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (1979; rev. ed. 2010), p. 474
  • He was must rank with Sir Noël Coward as one of the leaders of the twentieth-century stage in what has come to be known as the Theatre of Entertainment. It can be a misleading label; frequently Rattigan worked in depth. But it is true that, without venturing into what he regarded as unprofitable minority experiment, he wrote some of the most enduring narrative plays of his period, designed for a "commercial" theatre and using traditional techniques Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones would have recognized.
    • 'Sir Terence Rattigan: Enduring influence on the English theatre', The Times (1 December 1977), p. 16
  • From French Without Tears (1936) to his last work for the stage, Rattigan was unashamedly a West End writer, an absorbed craftsman with a wit that reflected his own friendly, generous nature. It was a pity, no doubt, that he invented, as a symbolic playgoer, the well-to-do, middle-class "Aunt Edna" whose tastes, he said, deserved as much attention as those of the avant-garde. Her name slipped into a catchphrase. Rattigan's opponents, at an hour of theatrical rebellion, took every chance to belittle a probing storyteller.
    • 'Sir Terence Rattigan: Enduring influence on the English theatre', The Times (1 December 1977), p. 16
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