Eminent theatre director, Sir Trevor Nunn, writes that Terence Rattigan was, during the middle years of the 20th century, ‘the most famous and successful, daring and original English playwright of the age’ alongside Noël Coward.
From 1936, when his light comedy, French Without Tears, became the biggest theatrical hit of the decade, to his death in 1977, there were few years in which a play by Rattigan was not playing in the West End.
French Without Tears tells the story of a group of young upper-middle-class men attending a crammer in France, where they are supposed to be learning the language but mostly spend their time flirting with girls, especially the attractive and dangerous Diana. Finally, Diana is turned down by all the young men, who agree to protect one another from her charms.
While it is theoretically possible, in hindsight, to see the affirmation of male solidarity as a veiled reference to Rattigan’s own gay sexuality, the play was rightly identified at the time as merely a ‘brilliant little comedy’ and beyond this, nevertheless impressive, achievement it doesn’t bear a great deal of scrutiny as an observation of human behaviour. While it is, evidently, based on his own experience of just such a crammer, it seems improbable that the autobiographical element in the piece is significant.
From his initial comic style, his focus shifted far more to an exploration of fear, despair, loneliness, unhappy relationships, and social mores. Above all, he created complex, conflicted characters, such as cuckolded and bitter public schoolmaster Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version or Major Pollock, intent on hiding his sexual improprieties from his fellow residents in a Bournemouth private hotel in Separate Tables.
Rattigan’s ability to convey enormously contained emotions bounded by a quintessentially British stiff upper lip was given its most compelling embodiment in Hester Collyer, the estranged wife of a High Court judge who has left her husband for a poor ex-Battle of Britain pilot named Freddy Page, in The Deep Blue Sea, first performed in 1952.
The play begins in a shabby flat in the then-unfashionable Camden area, when Hester’s fellow lodgers discover her semi-comatose body lying in front of the gas fire. She has tried to kill herself – gas appliances in those days used a toxic gas, not finally removed from British homes until 1977. In 1952, though, gas was poisonous and suicide, like homosexuality, was illegal: someone could be sent to prison for attempting it. What Rattigan does in this play, extraordinarily for the time, is to put on stage a woman driven by passion to ignore rationality and the dictates of class. Hester’s feelings for Freddy go far beyond the usual presentation of female sexuality in plays of the period – initially bottled up and reluctant to humiliate herself in public by being openly emotional, she is finally driven to cast decorum aside and almost literally throw herself at Freddy’s feet, despite the knowledge that he does not return her feelings. That her feelings for him are motivated by physical desire is left in no doubt. Freddy, too, knows that he can’t give Hester what she wants.
I believe The Deep Blue Sea, written in 1952, to be Rattigan’s masterpiece and, like much of his best work, it was inspired by events in his own life. A lover, Kenny Morgan, had left him for another man who, it seems, was unfaithful and cruel. Despite the efforts of Rattigan and others to help him, Morgan committed suicide. In the play, he becomes Hester and Rattigan himself represented to some extent by the outwardly unemotional but loving establishment figure of her husband, the High Court judge, Sir William Collyer. However, Rattigan crucially changes the outcome – Hester is dissuaded from killing herself by another character who has no direct cognate in real life, the secretive Mr Miller. Miller is evidently a doctor but has committed a crime in the past that prevents him from practicing medicine. The details of his crime are not revealed but it is certainly tempting to guess that Rattigan had in mind that Miller was prosecuted and struck off the medical register for homosexuality. Miller persuades Hester that she can carry on even though all reason for living has apparently gone, when Freddy has walked out on her. The play ends on an ambiguously optimistic note – she appears determined to stay alive but we don’t know, of course, whether her resolution will last after the curtain falls.
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