'My name's Benedict Cumberbatch, and I'm going to take you back in time.
'Imagine driving around London's West End in the '40s and '50s.
'You'd almost certainly have seen billboards advertising the plays of Terence Rattigan,
'the master of the well-crafted play,
'of upper-class manners and forbidden sexuality -
'a lost world of reticence and repression.'
Just over a year ago I was asked to take part in a revival of a Rattigan play, After The Dance,
and I had some preconceived ideas that gave me cause for trepidation,
as well as the usual actorly concerns -
"Oh, a bit typecast for me, you know, class-wise."
"It's a bit upper-middle class, stuff I want to get away from."
I think I had fears of him, as a writer, of not having any relevance
in the 21st century. I was worried about, "Why do this play now?"
But by experiencing an audience reaction to it,
which varied both in demographic and age remarkably,
for what you'd imagine a Rattigan audience to be comprised of,
it just showed how universal his appeal was.
I found myself at the start
of a huge upsurge of interest in Rattigan,
and now, in his centenary year,
it seems that people can't get enough of him all over again.
But Rattigan himself remains an enigmatic figure -
a troubled homosexual with a gift for commercial theatre,
who yearned to be taken seriously as a playwright
but who always felt an outsider.
So who was Terence Rattigan,
and what does he still have to say to us today?
As one of the highlights of Rattigan's centenary,
his play Cause Celebre is being performed here at the Old Vic.
It's the story of an upper-class woman who has a scandalous affair
with the young chauffeur she employs.
Let me take your cap. Thank you, miss.
By the way, it's "Mrs". "Mrs" three times over, as it happens.
HE CHUCKLES
Divorced? Yes,
once. Other one died.
And now seven years gone with old Rats -
Mr Rattenbury, my present one.
I'm giving things away, aren't I?
'The director of this production is a friend of mine, Thea Sharrock,
'who also directed me in After The Dance last year.
'I asked her what she thought Rattigan's appeal is today.'
When we first talked about After The Dance,
I was reticent, very irritatingly, I remember.
Do you mean when you said no? Yeah, when I said no!
Well, you know, I had, I think, this prejudice.
What would the sympathies be for these characters
in this privileged world between the wars?
How was a modern audience going to be drawn in?
Essentially, although the characters that he often writes about,
and After The Dance is a very good example of that,
are of a very small sliver of society,
what he is really interested in
is what it is that drives us,
what it is that makes our hearts ache,
what it is that makes us laugh,
what it is that makes us feel happy and take pleasure in other people,
and how we have an amazing capacity to hurt other people.
He always said, "This is the class that I come from,"
and he wrote about them because he understood them,
but you don't have to be a member of the class to understand it,
and that is what's so brilliant about his writing,
and why he's been so misunderstood for so long,
because people, like you, have made that mistake
of going, "Well, isn't it only that he writes about
a certain type of person for a certain type of person?"
And the answer is, no, he doesn't at all.
Terence Rattigan, like me, was educated at Harrow public school,
a place that seems to have played an early role
in nurturing his interest in theatre and playwriting.
Perhaps my prejudice of his limited appeal
came from my introduction to him whilst in this privileged bubble
of private-school education -
not that Harrow is particularly associated with theatre.
Many former prime ministers, statesmen, even royalty
have passed through its doors, as well as the odd commoner like me.
Rattigan was at Harrow 65 years before me,
but in many ways, the school hasn't changed that much -
well, at least to look at.
Harrow is a boarding school, and there are several houses
where the boys live during term time.
I was at one called The Park, which was also Rattigan's old house.
On Speech Day every summer term,
we would all be called together for the annual house photograph.
1991...
Summer of '91...
Autumn of '95...
Yeah. That's me. I had to double-check!
Blond hair, you see? Proof that I was once blond.
And look at those huge hands! Wicket-keeper's hands, I think,
which is what I ended up being. That's first year,
so I go up to '95. And then there, hair getting worse...
'94, so '95's the last year.
There we are. I think I'm wearing my Rattigan Society tie.
So many, many ties to remember.
That one was purple with white rats on it.
It was our theatre-going society tie,
and named in honour of the great man himself.
And terrible centre parting, replete with curtains.
It's strange being here. It's wonderful,
but it's like one of the lyrics in one of the Harrow songs -
"your heart will thrill at the thought of the Hill",
and it's...it's...it's very true. You get a rush of memories.
I wonder what Rattigan felt like at the same time.
Let's see if we can find him.
Now, where is he?
He starts in, er, 19...
1927.
Where is he?
Rattigan. There!
Gosh!
Very stern. Very severe centre parting, as well.
This is the second year, '28.
You can pick him out very easily. Right on the end here.
He's already got some kind of piping on a blazer,
which I presume is a sports colour.
So he was already achieving something in the world of sports.
And then...'29.
Then he's in his full flannels, and that would be for cricket.
A high achiever, and a very dapper dresser at a young age.
He certainly looked the part.
But in reality, without a scholarship,
he wouldn't have made it to Harrow at all.
Rattigan was born into a civil-service family
in Kensington, London, in 1911.
His father, Frank, was a diplomat, and from the age of two,
Terence spent much of his time with his grandmother,
whilst his parents lived a glamorous life overseas.
But in 1922, following a row with the foreign secretary,
his father was forced to retire on a small pension.
It was a huge humiliation.
But, by winning the scholarship to Harrow,
his son Terence could still have the opportunity
to follow in his father's footsteps into the diplomatic service.
But young Terence Rattigan's main passion was for drama.
The first dramatic criticism I ever received
came from a master at Harrow,
and was scrawled rather angrily in red ink
across the top of a one-page playlet in French
which I, with the rest of a very junior class,
had been set to compose during prep.
It ran, "French execrable. Theatre sense first-class."
I was awarded two marks out of ten.
'The school library, the Vaughan, had a large collection of plays
'to keep the budding playwright inspired.'
Rattigan spent hours here in the Vaughan library,
poring over classical texts as well as modern playwrights,
Galsworthy and other authors, Barrie, Pinero.
I think his interest was sparked mainly by Coke-Norris,
a very dry classics teacher. who was teaching him Aeschylus's the Agamemnon.
In class it was a very arduous exercise,
but he came to read the play here, and was just blown away
by its sheer power and emotion.
Whereas his classics teacher had treated the Greek story of Agamemnon
purely as an exercise in translation,
Rattigan read it as it was meant to be read -
as a powerful drama.
"Do you see those who sit before the house,
children like the shapes of dreams,
children who seem to have been killed by their kinsfolk,
filling their hands with meat, flesh of themselves,
guts and entrails, handfuls of lament?"
"Clear what they hold - the same their father tasted."
It's hard to see how that kind of drama could have been made dry in a classics classroom.
Or is it?
Rattigan would soon become a central figure
in the theatre life of the school.
Frank Rattigan encouraged his son's playwriting,
but only as a hobby. It wasn't looked upon as something
to be taken seriously as a profession.
A lot of parents who send their children to a place like Harrow
or Eton expect their sons to either follow in their footsteps,
if they are, like Frank Rattigan was, in the diplomatic corps,
or perhaps medicine or the law.
But something, watching this school rehearsal of As You Like It,
resonates with me. Both my parents are actors,
and wanted me to do anything but become an actor.
But unfortunately the bug bit quite early,
and involving myself in productions like this
where I played Rosalind, when I was all of 14...
I tried to persuade them that it was a good enough profession for me,
and, um, thank God, Rattigan did the same.
I was told that you couldn't make a living out of playwriting.
You couldn't make a living out of any kind of writing,
except possibly journalism, and I wouldn't have been trained for that.
And I remember the argument, endlessly, endlessly,
used by my father - "You can do it in your spare time, old boy."
But, of course, I later discovered this was absolute nonsense.
You can't write in your spare time.
'Martin Tyrrell, who teaches English and drama studies at Harrow,
'directed me in my early days on the school stage,
'and it was he who introduced me to Rattigan's work.'
What in particular do you think Rattigan drew on
from his time here, from the people and environs of this school?
I certainly think he would have found the community very exciting,
almost like a kind of soap opera,
with mini-tragedies playing out.
And he would have seen the marriages of some of the schoolteachers
teetering on the brink. He would have seen all the politics
that make for a boarding-school education,
and hierarchies,
and the drama of adolescent friendship and sudden enmities.
It would really have been an extremely good training
for a playwright, I think.
While at Harrow, I was fortunate enough
to play many roles, but one of the most memorable experiences
was that of playing Arthur Crocker- Harris in The Browning Version,
one of Rattigan's best-known plays. It's set in a boys' public school.
Crocker Harris is thought to be based on Rattigan's classics tutor,
Coke-Norris.
A failed teacher, he's being forced into early retirement,
while at home, his unfaithful wife describes him as "dead".
Wilson... Sir.
You were late for chapel this morning.
I have therefore submitted your name as an absentee.
I wasn't really late, sir. Only a few seconds, sir.
I was in the library, and you can't hear the bell.
You will no doubt recount those excuses to your housemaster, Wilson.
I fear I am not interested in them.
The austere, deliberately off-putting Crocker-Harris,
a man who knows that he is a failure,
has projected this image
which has earned him the soubriquet of "the Himmler of the lower fifth".
Sir, I thought this might interest you.
What is it? A verse translation of the Agamemnon -
the Browning version.
'And then there's this marvellous moment
'when Taplow gives him the Browning version of the Agamemnon.'
I think you will enjoy it more when you get used to the metre he employs.
Oh, but it's for you, sir.
For me? Yes, sir.
I've written in it.
'Crocker-Harris is moved to tears. It really strikes a chord...'
The humanisation of someone. Humanisation,
and also the stiff upper lip, which has been stiff and upper
for so long, being allowed a moment of...
To tremble. ..trembling, yes.
HE SOBS
'Rattigan's straitened family circumstances gave him the sense
'of not really belonging at the school.
'Public schools in Rattigan's day could be brutal places,
'where you could be easily made to feel the outsider.
'But he avoided being the target for bullying or exclusion,
'largely due to his brilliance on the cricket field.
He was an excellent batsman, and opened against Eton
in the annual games at Lord's.
But it wasn't just Rattigan's social standing
which made him feel an outsider, but also his sexuality.
It was probably in these formative years
that Rattigan would have realised he was homosexual.
At the time, homosexuality was illegal,
and viewed as completely unnatural.
He would have felt under great pressure to conform
to gender expectations and social expectations.
He must have felt this wrench within him.
That's why his plays are, you know, like Coward's,
full of figures who are tortured by their sexuality.
In 1930, Rattigan won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford,
to read history.
I didn't want particularly to take a degree.
I wasn't going to do any work. I was determined about that.
I was going to write plays, or...write something.
I did very little work, and I spent most of the time
either going to plays at Oxford or coming up to see plays in London,
or, occasionally, performing - excruciatingly badly,
and once or twice writing, but usually obscene sketches.
Whilst there, Rattigan worked on a play called First Episode,
which focussed on the experiences of a group of university friends.
With a small inheritance, Rattigan put up money
towards the opening of First Episode in an experimental theatre in Kew.
It then moved into the West End.
Rattigan felt he had made it as a playwright,
and decided to quit Oxford.
But after a couple of months the play closed,
and Rattigan found himself broke.
Humiliated, he had to move back in with his parents.
For the next couple of years he continued to try and prove himself
as a playwright, but had constant rejections.
Then, in October 1936, his luck changed.
A major show at the Criterion Theatre had unexpected flopped.
The management needed a cheap production for a six-week gap
until the next play was ready.
Rattigan's rejected comedy, French Without Tears,
was offered the slot.
French Without Tears tells the story of five students
at a residential language school in France,
when a beautiful, man-hunting young woman, Diana,
is introduced into their midst.
It was later turned into a Hollywood film,
starring Ray Milland and Ellen Drew.
I do love you, Alan.
In it, Rattigan explores unreciprocated love,
but to comic effect.
Say that again, blast you. Say that again!
I do love you!
No! No!
Chris! Bill!
Bill! I'm starting for London tomorrow.
Never leave me alone with that girl till I'm safely on the train. Promise!
I promise. I promise.
Before the opening night, Rattigan was a bundle of nerves.
Finding the right actors for this production hadn't been easy.
Some of the tryouts had been a disaster.
The dress rehearsal itself was also pretty spectacularly awful.
So he paced the streets of London and went for a haircut,
a thing that was to become a ritual for him on first nights.
He went with his family to a restaurant for a meal and a bottle of champagne,
and in the glum atmosphere, his mother, Vera, began another first-night ritual.
She took the cork from the bottle and put it in her handbag
as good luck.
And with an inexperienced cast,
Rattigan was going to need all the help he could get.
They were all unknowns. We had to cast it in a second -
I mean over a weekend. Every sign pointed to disaster.
When they turned up, the family found an ill-tempered audience.
It was a wet June night. Most of them had struggled through a very busy West End.
There were other openings - a Marlene Dietrich film, for example.
The first 20 minutes of the play went very, very quickly.
The actors were incredibly nervous. Harold French, the director
cowered in his box for fear that it would all run away from them.
But eventually they found their feet,
and the audience were completely beguiled by the charms of the play.
And at the end, after many cries of "author, author",
French went to the back of the theatre and found Rattigan pressed against the wall,
green with nerves, and eventually persuaded to drag him onto the stage
where he took his acclaim.
APPLAUSE
The first-night success of French Without Tears was confirmed.
The theatre was packed with delighted audiences every night.
The play ran for more than a thousand performances.
This huge commercial success launched Rattigan's career
as a playwright. He now had money and fame.
After the success of French Without Tears,
Rattigan embarked on a writer's round of drinking,
parties, gambling, and a slew of affairs with attractive young men.
All this living the high life didn't inspire any new work,
and whether it was simply that, or a writer's block,
it would be a couple of years before Rattigan wrote another play.
And when he did, it would turn out to be a far more serious drama.
After The Dance is set in 1938,
but looks at the 1920s generation of bright young things
who, although no longer bright or young,
insist on partying just like in the good old days.
I've a good mind to slap you very hard indeed.
Go on. Slap away, and I'll slap back. Ooh!
At the centre of this world is the hard-drinking historian, David Scott-Fowler.
Joan, his wife, is unable to tell David the true depth of her feelings for him,
even though, earlier that day, she has discovered he is in love with someone else.
I'm glad we never made the mistake of falling in love with each other.
Sometimes I think ours is the best basis of all for marriage.
Perhaps it is.
It's worked for us, hasn't it?
It might have worked even better if we'd fallen in love with each other,
like you and Helen.
That's something different altogether.
I'm not even sure that I...like Helen as a person.
Not in the way I like you.
I know that I love her. That's something I can't explain.
Unable to face her husband leaving, Joan commits suicide
by jumping from the balcony of their flat.
Rattigan's theme here, of unequal feelings within relationships,
returns many times in his work.
When rehearsing and performing David Scott-Fowler
at the National last year,
one of the discoveries was how the intensity of this drama
was amplified by the detailed stage directions.
Rattigan is a joy to perform. He's a very actor-friendly writer.
It's very clear, in the structure of his plays,
what the character's emotional arc is over the course of the evening,
and nowhere is that more in evidence than in his stage directions,
which can be sublimely subtle. It could be a turn of the head,
it could be the taking up of a cigarette,
the changing of a record, all of which speak for unspoken emotions,
words and thoughts. And I wanted to share one with you that happens
at the end of After The Dance. In the previous act,
David's wife, Joan, has committed suicide
by throwing herself off the balcony, and, this last scene,
David's left alone on stage.
"David goes to the window, hesitates a moment, and then steps out on to the balcony."
"As if making a terrific effort, he slowly leans over
and looks down."
"He stays in that position for a few seconds,
and then steps back into the room, closing the window after him."
That, for me, said everything in that moment
about what David Scott-Fowler understood to be his fault -
the death of his wife, and how he was coming to terms
with the reality of what she'd done by looking over that balcony and facing his own future,
of pretty certain death by going back to the bottle.
It's amazing stuff.
After The Dance first opened in June 1939.
But war was looming. Audiences dropped off,
and the play had to close after just six weeks,
and, until our recent production, was rather a forgotten play.
'I've come to the British Library, where many of Rattigan's letters and manuscripts are kept.
'His biographer, Michael Darlow, knows this material intimately.
'I asked him what happened to Rattigan
'when After The Dance closed unexpectedly early.'
After After The Dance, he got what, in effect, was a writer's block...
..which he actually later himself described
as a nervous breakdown, and he really couldn't write.
And he consulted this psychiatrist,
who advised him to, um...
get into the services and see some active service.
Following the outbreak of war, there was a huge surge of volunteers
wanting to join up and fight Hitler.
Rattigan wanted to join the RAF, but the competition was fierce.
He wouldn't have got into the Air Force,
but the interview board... Suddenly one of them said,
"Oh, you're the chap who wrote French Without Tears!"
And so he got accepted for the Air Force.
Oh, boy! Er... I mean, thanks very much, sir.
And he then launched into his training as an officer,
air-gunner, radio operator,
and he writes this letter, fairly early in his training,
to his father, and describes the huge concentration required
to remember all the drills, all the knobs you have to turn
to get the radio equipment to work properly,
and how it demands such total concentration,
keeping your head.
Suddenly, um, he was in a war,
concentrating, having to stay alive,
having responsibility for other men.
It transformed him, and the urge to write came back.
In 1941, whilst on a mission in West Africa,
Rattigan started a new play, Flare Path.
He carried the handwritten manuscript in his kit bag
at all times, until one long, eventful flight to Freetown.
RATTLE OF GUNFIRE
On the way down... We were shot at on the way down.
We were damaged, and one of the engines packed up,
and it looked as if we wouldn't make it.
We had to lighten the aircraft, and everybody's luggage had to go overboard.
And my own kit bag was just poised on the point of going over,
when I suddenly delved into it, and, regarded with enormous suspicion
by the rest of the crew, I began pulling the pages away
from the hardbacked notebook, and throwing the hardback
but keeping the paper. We arrived with two minutes' fuel.
We were really lucky to get down,
and I was lucky to have the manuscript of the play.
The play features a group of airmen and their loved ones
during the night and the following morning
of a night-bombing mission over Germany.
It dealt with love, fear, bravery,
and the emotional trauma of war,
precisely catching the mood in Britain at that time.
On seeing it, Winston Churchill apparently said
it was a masterpiece of understatement.
Rattigan later adapted it into the film Way To The Stars.
I know what you've come to tell me, Peter.
You do? Yes. You see...
he didn't ring up this evening,
and I counted one plane missing when you came back over the town.
Tell me just one thing.
How much hope is there?
I see.
No hope at all. Not very much, I'm afraid.
As well as Flare Path, many of Rattigan's dramas
were turned into successful films for which he wrote the screenplays.
One of the most celebrated was The Winslow Boy,
a play which opened in 1946,
later made into a film by Anthony Asquith.
Rattigan takes the real story of a naval cadet
who is expelled from college for an alleged minor theft.
It charts his father's determination to get him a fair trial.
Rattigan champions the rights of the individual
against the legal and political establishment.
It was seen at the time as part of a post-war move
to greater democracy.
Have you ever studied Magna Carta, sir? Not very closely, I'm afraid.
Have you? Closely enough to know that there's a clause
which states that no subject of the king may be condemned without trial.
My son, I presume, is a subject of the king. Certainly.
And he has been condemned without trial. From the purely civilian point of view.
And from a purely civilian point of view,
I'm going to fight you, sir. And I'm going to win.
Writing for films was a lucrative business,
and by the late '40s, Rattigan was one of the best-paid screenwriters in the world.
JAZZ-DANCE MUSIC
'His success bought him a lavish lifestyle,
'both in London and in the countryside.
'He bought himself a mansion near Ascot, called Little Court.
'It would become famous for its weekend parties.
'The house has been restored to its former glory
'by the current owners. I'm meeting someone here
'who remembers those party days well,
'and who hasn't been back since the 1950s.'
Hello. Hello!
Lovely to meet you. My name's Benedict. Mine's Jean.
'Jean Dawnay, now known as Princess Jean Galitzine
'after marrying into Russian aristocracy,
'was a famous fashion model,
'and met Rattigan at a party after the war.
'They became very close friends, and many, including Rattigan's mother,
'thought they might one day get married.
'She's agreed to show me round and share some of her memories.'
After you. Come on in. Oh, lovely.
Amazing.
It's unbelievable.
And when was the last time that you were here, Jean?
Well, I would think about 50 or 60 years.
Wow. It's strange to go back so much,
and still have clear memories.
I can even remember his mother sitting there. Isn't that amazing?
I can really see her, almost. She was a very distinguished woman,
very grande dame, very much a Victorian type of...
Silver-white hair and lovely blue eyes,
which is where he got his blue eyes from.
Is your memory of this room being used as an entertainment space
in the evening? Absolutely. I can practically see them.
I remember one particular party was for Marilyn Monroe,
because she was here to make a film, The Prince And The Showgirl,
Laurence Olivier. And so we had everybody and his wife
you ever heard of in the theatre world.
Great party. And she'd just got married to Arthur Miller,
and so she was trying to rather live up to his intellect,
and she was sweet. Very touching.
It feels like it was a happy place. Was it a happy place? Oh, very.
People longed to be asked, and they loved it when they came,
and so on, and it was always fun.
'Jean's relationships with various boyfriends
'were of constant interest to Rattigan,
'and some of her experiences inspired his female characters.'
That's fantastic. Most relationships are so complicated.
One's more keen on the other,
or one's not sure of themselves with the other - whatever it is.
And did you share that in conversation with him? Oh, yes,
and we would analyse it all - oh, what a woman feels.
All the time, he would always ask me, "What did he say?"
If I had an argument with a boyfriend,
"What did he say that made you so cross, or you made him so cross?"
I could tell him anything, and we would talk about every situation.
It was lovely. It was like going to a father-confessor.
You must have seemed like the perfect couple.
We were so happy. If one could have a relationship like that...
It's ideal. Yeah.
You know, he was...oh, homosexual.
And, of course, now it's quite natural,
but those days it was not at all considered natural,
and they put people in prison. Can you imagine?
I mean, it's unbelievable.
But it did cause...
People had to turn the other way, as if you didn't know.
And that's why I often wonder if his mother knew about it. Mm.
I honestly don't know whether she refused to admit it,
or didn't know, because sometimes people were very innocent then.
# Here we are
# Out of cigarettes
# Holding hands and yawning
# Look how late it gets
# Two sleepy people
# By dawn's early light
# And too much in love to say good night #
'Visiting Rattigan's house in the Berkshire countryside
'and chatting to Jean has given me a real sense of his lifestyle
'in the early '50s.
'He obviously spent lots of time writing here,
'but also knew how to enjoy himself,
'and it seems his diary was pretty full of socialising and parties.
'But as Jean told me, behind the public persona,
'there were secrets. He had to keep his intimate relationships private.'
Hello, Benedict. You found your way, then?
It's good to see you. Lovely to meet you.
Come in and we'll have a little talk in the saloon.
'One of Rattigan's partners at this time was Adrian Brown.
'Adrian started a six-year relationship with the 44-year-old Rattigan when he was just 22.
'I asked him how difficult it was to keep an affair like theirs secret.'
Well, it wasn't hard if you were gay,
because there were all sorts... HE LAUGHS
..of private societies, private clubs and this sort of thing.
It was great fun, to tell you the truth.
No-one must know about it, because it wouldn't be nice,
and everybody had to be nice. Did you ever meet Vera Rattigan?
Did you ever meet his mother? No. I never met her at all.
I had quite expected that tea parties would take place,
that sort of thing, but they never did,
so I never met the good lady, or did any of his other chums,
because Mother then might discover that he was not quite nice, you see.
He had these strange proclivities, and Mother must be protected.
The man of great sophistication and ease and bon viveur,
and the wit, the person who is comfortable in his skin in public -
was he at all different in private?
No, not really. He was always very witty and well dressed.
He had a good tournure de phrase.
He could bring back a repartee to any question.
It was this, and the cigarette would be held up there
until he was ready to smoke it again,
and there would usually be a gin and tonic in the other hand.
Dosing with both hands all the time. Yes.
'The social-butterfly image of Rattigan
'is certainly in keeping with his desire to entertain
'within his plays. However, he was not content
'to purely be a Noel Coward figure. There was another side to him,
'which wanted to be seen as a serious dramatist.
He preferred to be thought of for the undertones
and the subtext writing that he could do in the Chekhovian manner.
He was not quite as good at the comedies as Noel Coward was,
but he was better at the serious plays than Noel Coward was,
so he valued himself on the serious plays
like The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version.
Those were where he thought he was going.
# I'm sitting on top of the world
# Just rolling along
# Just rolling along #
Alongside Noel Coward,
Rattigan was fast becoming one of the UK's leading playwrights.
At the time, the theatre establishment was run by a small group of men,
an elite group, and at the head of that was a man called Binkie Beaumont,
a theatre manager of notorious influence and power.
He was the puppet-master of the West End,
controlling exactly which productions would get the go-ahead.
He was homosexual, and his preference for working with other homosexuals was notorious.
If you didn't fit into Binkie's set, you had no chance in the West End.
He would have a big influence on Rattigan's fate.
He was said to be suave, sophisticated, well dressed
and well mannered, with a smile always on his face
even at his most ruthless.
With his background and his success,
Rattigan fitted naturally into Binkie's set.
And although he wanted to be considered as a serious playwright,
he wrote a controversial article in 1950
which linked him even more closely with the entertainment-driven commercial theatre of Beaumont.
There was a long tradition in British theatre,
going back to Bernard Shaw, of writing plays which engage with social issues.
But in his article, Rattigan attacked what he called
"the play of ideas" for being too concerned
with contemporary problems.
Rattigan says, "I don't think that ideas, per se,
social, political or moral, have a very important place in theatre."
"They definitely take third place to character and narrative, anyway."
And then the bit that got him into real trouble - "The trouble with theatre today
is not that so few writers refuse to look facts in the face
but that so many refuse to look at anything else."
The critical storm that joined this article
was quite unprecedented.
He became identified with safe, conservative, commercial choices
in the theatre world.
And the commercial theatre of the time was still restricted
in what it could show.
All plays had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain,
effectively a censor, before they could be performed.
In 1952, Rattigan wrote a play inspired
by the suicide of one of his lovers, Kenneth Morgan,
called The Deep Blue Sea. It's believed the earliest drafts
focussed on a failed homosexual relationship,
but this would never have been accepted.
The final version, with a heterosexual couple,
was a huge West End success.
Deep Blue Sea ran for 500 performances,
and Rattigan wrote the screenplay for the film
starring Vivien Leigh and Kenneth More.
The Deep Blue Sea's main character is Hester.
Driven by passion, she leaves her upper-class husband
to live with a younger man. But when he decides to leave,
her fragile new world starts to crumble.
Hes, this is our last chance. We're death to each other, you and I.
It's not true. It is, darling, and you've known it longer than I have.
I haven't finished them! Well, all right.
SHE SOBS
Oh, I'm sorry, Hes. Oh, I'm sorry. Please don't cry!
You don't know what it does to me. I've got to get out of here.
Not this minute, Freddie! Not just this minute!
You've got all your things here. I'll send for them.
But you promised you'd be in for dinner. You can't break a promise!
Don't leave me alone, Freddie! Don't leave me alone tonight!
Not tonight, Freddie! Not tonight!
Come back, Freddie! Don't go, Freddie!
SHE SOBS Don't go, Freddie!
Freddie, don't leave me alone tonight.
SHE SOBS
'As part of the wide revival of Rattigan's work,
'a new feature film of The Deep Blue Sea is being produced.
'I've come to a sound studio in Soho, London,
'where the film's director, Terence Davies,
'is adding the finishing touches to the sound.
'He's going to let me have a rare sneak peek at it.'
Beware of passion, Hester.
It always leads to something ugly.
What would you replace it with?
A guarded enthusiasm.
My first experience of the play was seeing it at the Almeida.
It was a school outing, and it was the most extraordinary experience,
and one of the main reasons why I took this nonsense profession up
and really had a go at being an actor.
I'm fascinated to know what drew you to The Deep Blue Sea
as potential for film. Well, it came out of the blue.
I didn't really know it. Sean O'Connor, one of the producers,
asked if I'd like to do a Rattigan,
and the only one I remembered was The Deep Blue Sea,
and so I said, "Well, I'll read it." And at first I was very worried,
because I didn't really know what it was about subtextually.
So I read it a few more times, and I said, "I know what it's about now."
"It's about love, the nature of love,
of one person wanting a kind of love from the other person
which the other person can't give." Once I knew that, I said I'd do it.
Why I was drawn to it was that here was someone
who's actually very conventional, and has married for companionship
and not sexuality, because Collyer was a nice man,
and then she finds sex. She finds eroticism and sex.
And that's so powerful that it consumes her.
She leaves her husband and goes and lives with a man.
That you did not do in the '50s.
What's she going to do? How is she going to live?
And she takes that risk without actually thinking about the risk.
That's what's extraordinary - that you can be overwhelmed
by this emotion called love,
but also, I suppose, what I did respond to deeply
is the fact that she's an outsider, and I feel like an outsider.
Always have done, even though I'm the eldest of ten children.
I've always felt as though I've been looking in at life.
Other people participate in life, and I seem to always just look at it.
And that's what I liked about it as well.
'Rattigan, too, was undoubtedly an outsider.
'Although he was hugely successful and mixed in all the right circles,
'he was an onlooker of life,
'unable to be open about his homosexuality
'in his private life, or directly express it in his work.
'In 1953, following the critical success of The Deep Blue Sea,
'Rattigan wrote a much lighter affair,
'The Sleeping Prince.'
Despite being commercially successful,
it disappointed the critics.
Rattigan was becoming highly sensitive to their criticism,
and used a preface to a new collection of his works
to argue that, just because his plays were commercially successful,
there was no reason not to take them seriously.
To help his argument, he invented a comic character called Aunt Edna,
an aging lady theatregoer living in a Kensington hotel.
"Aunt Edna does not appreciate Kafka - 'so obscure, my dear,
and why always look at the dark side of things?' -
she is upset by Picasso - 'those dreadful reds, my dear,
and why three noses?' - and she is against Walton -
'such appalling discords, my dear, and no melody at all'."
"She is, in short, a hopeless lowbrow,
and the great novelist, the master painter, and the composer of genius
are, and can afford to be as disregarding of her tastes as she is unappreciative of their works."
"Not so, unhappily, the playwright,
for should he displease Aunt Edna, he is utterly lost."
"'Oh, it was so dull, my dears. Don't think of going to it at all.'"
"'So much talk. So little action! So difficult to see the actors' faces,
and even the tea was cold.'"
Ugh!
Aunt Edna was intended as a light-hearted creation,
but she quickly came to be seen as synonymous with Rattigan himself.
Yet again, Rattigan had helped to pigeonhole himself
as belonging to a rather old-fashioned,
light, commercial theatre - a spectacular own goal.
But in his next play, Rattigan would once again display
his more serious side.
Separate Tables explored the difficulties
of honest sexual expression. It opened in 1954,
and two years later was made into an award-winning film.
One of the central characters, played in the film by David Niven, is the major.
I rather think you mean a lot to her.
He's uncovered as a fraud who has been arrested for molesting women
in a local cinema.
One's awfully apt to try and excuse oneself sometimes by saying,
"Well, what I do doesn't do anybody else much harm."
But one does, you see, and it's not a thought that I like very much.
Well, mustn't miss the old train, what, what?
In Rattigan's original script,
the major's offence was a homosexual one,
but again Rattigan toned it down
to avoid the Lord Chamberlain's blue pencil
and appeal to a mainstream audience.
Paranoia about homosexuality had re-emerged with a vengeance
after the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War,
and there was a concerted drive against male vice,
with a huge increase in arrests.
The early 1950s were characterised by a series
of notorious homosexual scandals.
The rich and the famous became targets,
including Sir John Gielgud, the foremost classical actor
of his generation. He was arrested for gross indecency.
His court appearance and arrest caused a sensation
in the tabloid press, and the exposure risked his both reputation
and his career. The judge fined him £10 and told him to see a doctor.
'With such stories hitting the press,
'it was understandable that Rattigan should feel constrained
'about addressing homosexuality in his work.'
But by 1956, the social mood in Britain was changing,
and, ironically, a more overt theatre was emerging,
but outside the commercial theatre of the West End.
Here at the Royal Court in Sloane Square,
a man called George Devine was encouraging a new generation
of young writers and directors who hated the middle-brow, middle-class theatre of Binkie Beaumont.
Rattigan could hardly have imagined what effect
an evening trip to a new play at this theatre would have
on his future career.
Rattigan had an apartment here in Eaton Square,
so he didn't have far to travel on the night of the 8th of May 1956
to Sloane Square, to attend the world premiere of Look Back In Anger,
a play by a very young new talent, John Osborne.
It was a night that was to mark the beginning of Rattigan's fall from grace,
and it would be many years until one of his plays
was applauded in a London theatre again.
'Not for nothing would Osborne and other writers at the Royal Court
'become known as the "angry young men",
'as Rattigan was about to find out.
'Osborne's play was the catalyst for their new movement.'
If only something, something, would happen to you,
wake you up out of your beauty sleep!
If you could have a child, and it would die.
Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge
from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles.
Please, now, please! If only I could watch you face that.
I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself,
but I doubt it!
CHURCH BELLS RING Now the bloody bells have started!
In the central character of Look Back In Anger,
Jimmy Porter, a new generation had found its voice.
Stop those bells! There's somebody going crazy in here.
Don't want to hear them!
# I feel the weather is changing
# You're growing colder #
To them, Rattigan and his ilk represented
what one of them would call "the pale side of the establishment" -
an establishment they intended to sweep away.
Rattigan came here for the opening night of Look Back In Anger
with Binkie Beaumont, who had to restrain him in his seat
to stop him from leaving early. When the play did finish,
he was asked for his opinion by a journalist,
to which he flippantly replied it seemed to him
that John Osborne was saying, "Look, Ma, I'm not Terence Rattigan."
This glib response proved him dangerously out of touch with the younger generation,
and it was seized upon by the press to begin the damaging contrast
between him and the younger generation of writers.
Playwright David Hare was the resident dramatist
here at the Royal Court in the early '70s.
'Though inspired to become a writer by the angry young men,
'he has a more complicated attitude to Rattigan,
'whilst respecting some of his work as a playwright.'
The two greatest plays are The Browning Version,
which I think is a masterpiece, and The Deep Blue Sea,
which I think is also a masterpiece. There are some very good plays,
like The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, which are very good plays.
But his subject, in those great plays,
is so...harrowing, which...
And I would take Rattigan's true subject to be...
the impossibility of escaping who you are.
You're born with a character,
which is your fate, your destiny, and you can struggle, but you can't -
It's a Greek theme. Why do you think he fell out of favour?
It wasn't so much that Rattigan was out of favour
with the British theatre as that he'd written most of his best work.
In my opinion, he wrote most of his best work
by the time the Royal Court came along
and different kinds of writers appeared.
The Royal Court represented an attempt
to put plays into the repertory
which were not necessarily about mainstream, middle-class subjects,
but about the rest of the population.
The country's changing and the theatre's changing with it,
and when it happens, it's so... both invigorating to Rattigan,
and threatening to him at the same time.
Rattigan's next play, Variation On A Theme,
was slated by reviewers.
Any play I wrote was going to get smashed.
I had no chance with anything.
They just didn't say why they didn't like it.
They just said that it must be bad because it is old, effete.
It is the old theatre.
'Rattigan didn't do himself any favours
'by painting himself as a martyr,
'but even so, the critics were ferocious,
'and one of those, Benedict Nightingale,
'now thinks that they went too far.'
I saw Look Back In Anger, and I was very influenced by that.
I put on my blue suede shoes and drainpipe trousers, saw the play,
and to me at that time, Rattigan represented everything
that was reactionary, and because of the invention of Aunt Edna,
a bit Philistine, too. I feel I was wrong.
I saw only one side of him. I think an awful lot of us did.
He categorised himself as someone who was anti the zeitgeist
of the time, anti the social drama that was so important at the time.
# No money
# Forget the money #
Feeling rejected by the theatre world,
Rattigan spent much of the '60s abroad,
living in Bermuda and spending time in Hollywood.
He wrote many successful screenplays for television and film,
including The VIPs and The Yellow Rolls Royce.
But for me, it was a period
where Rattigan's quality of writing dropped.
Softened by spongers and sycophants,
and stagnating by retreating into this old world,
he remained very out of keeping with the times.
Nightingale's reviews of the plays would often get a reply from him.
He wrote me quite a few letters, but he was writing everyone letters.
I think he stayed up very late at night.
I think he drank quite a lot. I think he was deeply unhappy
and alienated, and felt an awful failure,
and hated himself for all sorts of reasons,
and what he could do was simply scrawl and write.
I mean, here are some of the...frankly, scrawls,
and they're rather incoherent at times.
This is a postcard Rattigan sent you from his home in Bermuda,
so it must have been quite late on. January the 24th, but not a year.
It says, "Dear Benedict Nightingale, I must seize a wobbly pen
to thank you for a notice that has given me more pleasure and pride
than any that I can remember. I'm afraid that it's my own fault."
"I damned myself by that idiotic invention
in a hastily written preface 22 years ago of Aunt Edna."
"I've never been allowed to bury the old bitch,
or even explain more seriously what I meant by her
(something like Shakespeare's groundlings,
who have to be satisfied). It doesn't matter."
"No regrets. Thank you again."
"Deeply, Terence Rattigan."
It's a terribly moving admission of a failing.
Things got very difficult for him.
But his desperation is what shows through.
That's what I find distressing, actually.
He was desperate for acknowledgment,
much more than any other playwright I know.
He thought they were probably right about him.
He thought he was a failure, and, my God, he was not a failure.
Rattigan's health deteriorated throughout the '60s.
It wasn't clear what illness he had,
but it can't have been helped by his heavy drinking.
But in 1971, Rattigan returned to England to receive a knighthood
in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
He was only the second playwright to receive such an honour
since the First World War, the first being Noel Coward.
A year later, he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
He was dying when he wrote his final play,
Cause Celebre.
Cause Celebre was based on a real-life scandal
that happened in 1935. Alma Rattenbury,
the wife of a retired architect,
began an affair with their 18-year-old chauffeur.
The chauffeur, in a fit of jealousy and pique,
bludgeoned the husband to death with a mallet.
Both were charged with his murder and tried at the Old Bailey,
and you can see from newspaper articles at the time
that the trial caused quite a sensation,
with the public crying out for this scarlet woman's blood.
I remember the case well.
I was, er...what, 24?
And I remember having violent arguments with my family about it.
Of course, naturally both my mother and father hated her
as a symbol of everything that was dreadful,
but I, as a budding dramatist, thought that she had a case.
THEY LAUGH
Oh, very good! Well, I'm not quite Fred Astaire.
No, and I'm not Ginger Rogers.
Oh, I just want to go on and on like this.
I want to go on and on like this till the end of the world.
'I asked Thea Sharrock, the director of the recent hit production
'of Cause Celebre at London's Old Vic,
'why Rattigan chose Alma's scandal in the '30s
'for a play performed in the '70s.'
She was turned into a monster by the media,
because people couldn't believe a woman could behave
in the way that she did, and yet in 1977,
she must have felt so normal, and now she feels even more normal.
And so yet again he's kind of put his finger on the pulse
and managed to track down a particular character...
And show the relevance across time. Exactly!
Mrs Davenport, I understand from the jury bailiff
that you wish to be excused jury service
on the grounds of conscience. Yes, My Lord.
From this particular jury on this particular case.
Interwoven with Alma's story is the fictitious Edith Davenport,
a sexually repressed woman thought to be based on Rattigan's mother.
I... I have a deep prejudice
against that woman.
There's something really interesting about his last play
managing to kind of wrap up the big themes of love
and sex and marriage,
and somehow he's managed to put his own mother right in the heart of it.
There's something really arresting about that.
Rattigan attended the opening night of his final play.
He was there to hear the applause
as Cause Celebre was acclaimed by both the critics and the public.
After 20 years in the wilderness,
Rattigan's reputation was finally on the turn.
It feels very gratifying, and it's also something
I didn't think would happen to me.
I'd always thought they had been a bit unfair to me,
and I always thought that justice would one day be done.
Only weeks after Cause Celebre opened,
Sir Terence Rattigan died. He was 66.
'It's been fascinating finding out more about Rattigan -
'a man who was a social insider, yet always an emotional outsider.
'The intolerance and prejudice of society
'forced him to hide his own sexuality.
'Many of his characters in his work
'have to live with their own inability to express themselves,
'creating a powerful tension at the heart of his plays.
'And yet I see his work as a plea for openness and honesty.'
One of Rattigan's ambitions was to write plays
that would be remembered 50 years on,
and in this, his centenary year, he certainly achieved that.
He was a master of human emotion, and he wrote plays
that contained themes which were relevant universally
to all human relationships.
I think it's that that truly makes him a great playwright,
and someone who's revered even today,
100 years after his birth.
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