Rattigan, Sir Terence (Mervyn)

Rattigan, Sir Terence (Mervyn) (1911–77), the son of a diplomat, was educated at Trinity College, Oxford. His first West End success was a comedy, French Without Tears (1936, pub. 1937). Many other works followed, including The Winslow Boy (1946), a drama in which a father fights to clear his naval-cadet son of the accusation of petty theft, and The Browning Version (1948), about a repressed and unpopular schoolmaster with a faithless wife. The heroine of The Deep Blue Sea (1952) is a judge's wife suffering from passion for a test pilot; Separate Tables (1954, pub. 1955), comprises two one-act plays set in a hotel, both studies of emotional failure and inadequacy; Ross (1960) is based on the life of T. E. Lawrence; and Cause Célèbre (1977, pub. 1978) is based on an actual murder trial. In a preface to the second volume of his Collected Works (1953), Rattigan created the character of Aunt Edna, the average middlebrow matinée attender whom playwrights must take into account: critics later used this light-hearted invention as a focus for their complaints about the middle-class, middlebrow nature of his own plays. The so-called kitchen sink dramatists of the 1950s and 1960s reacted against Rattigan but his works are still much performed and admired.