Rattigan, Sir Terence Mervyn

Rattigan, Sir Terence Mervyn (1911–77), English playwright, author of a number of well-constructed and theatrically effective works. His first play, First Episode (1933; NY, 1934), written in collaboration, was followed by an immensely successful light comedy, French without Tears (1936; NY, 1937). He later achieved a further success with Flare Path (London and NY, 1942), a topical war play with an RAF background. Next came two more comedies, While the Sun Shines (1943; NY, 1944) and Love in Idleness (1944), the latter providing an excellent vehicle for the Lunts, who played it in London and in 1946 in New York as O Mistress Mine. Rattigan, hitherto considered no more than an astute purveyor of light entertainment, now began to show signs of a more serious purpose with The Winslow Boy (1946; NY, 1947), based on the true story of a father's fight to clear his young son of a charge of petty theft. Playbill (1948; NY, 1949) consisted of two short plays, The Browning Version and Harlequinade, the former an excellent study of a repressed schoolmaster and his illmatched wife. Adventure Story (1949), with Paul Scofield as Alexander the Great, proved an interesting failure, and with Who is Sylvia? (1950) Rattigan returned to his former vein of light comedy. His next play, however, The Deep Blue Sea (London and NY, 1952), was a deeply emotional study of a judge's wife (played successively by Peggy Ashcroft, Celia Johnson, and Googie Withers) who falls in love with a feckless, drunken, ex-RAF fighter pilot and twice attempts suicide. An excursion into Ruritanian romance followed with The Sleeping Prince (1953; NY, 1956), in which Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh appeared. It was in the preface to his collected plays in 1953 that Rattigan first used the term ‘Aunt Edna’ to indicate the ordinary unsophisticated playgoer who has no use for experimental, avant-garde plays. It has since proved a useful term for drama critics and an Aunt Sally for the progressives. Rattigan's next play, Separate Tables (1954; NY, 1956), was a double bill (The Window Table and Table Number Seven) which portrayed with compassion the problems of a group of characters in a Bournemouth hotel. It was followed by Variations on a Theme (1958); Ross (1960; NY, 1961) with Alec Guinness as T. E. Lawrence; Joie de Vivre (also 1960), a musical version of French without Tears which lasted only four nights; and Man and Boy (London and NY, 1963). After an unusually long interval came A Bequest to the Nation (1970), on Nelson and Lady Hamilton; another double bill, In Praise of Love (Before Dawn and After Lydia) (1973; a ‘full version’ of After Lydia was produced in New York as In Praise of Love in 1974); and Cause Célèbre (1977), based on a real-life murder case, which was still running when Rattigan died.