Book Review : Sir Terence Rattigan: Once Over Lightly

The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theater of Character by B. A. Young (Atheneum: $18.95)

Of the myriad and often inscrutable motives for writing a biography--admiration, respect, envy, vanity; the availability of hitherto inaccessible material, a desire to set the record straight, a conviction that one understands the subject better than his predecessors--surely mild indifference is the least comprehensible.

Instead of the authoritative biography of Sir Terence Rattigan promised in the jacket notes or the sympathetic critical study we’re led to expect from the Financial Times notice, “The Rattigan Version” is hardly more than a 200-page resume of Rattigan’s professional career, extended by plot summaries, snippets of dialogue, and a list of the various actors who appeared in the New York and London versions of the plays.

Though Young has served as drama critic for both Punch and the Financial Times, and makes a point of his long friendship with the playwright, the book is blandly patronizing and entirely impersonal.

Reading the quotes from condescending reviews, the terse obituaries of plays closed after relatively few performances, the frequent reminders that Rattigan’s efforts seldom succeeded in America despite their impressive runs in England, one begins to wonder how Rattigan ever became one of the most celebrated playwrights of the century.

Brown does have an answer for that. In his opinion, Rattigan wrote for a hypothetical “Aunt Edna,” a thoroughly middlebrow, conservative spinster of a certain age who went to the theater only to be entertained by the spectacle of her social superiors making fools of themselves in elegantly appointed drawing rooms. “She enjoys pictures, books, music and the theater, and though to none of these arts . . . does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she ‘does know what she likes.’ ”

To Aunt Edna, Picasso is the man who painted people with three noses, Kafka a depressive who always looked on the dark side of things, and the contemporary composer Walton overpraised for his experiments in discord. “Terry has indeed virtually described himself in describing her. Not a maiden lady, certainly, but middle-class, nice, respectable, with more time on his hands than he would have found in the Diplomatic. . . . He wrote whatever he thought a management might accept, whether it was light comedy or a turgid piece about tangled emotions.”

Whether the ostensible subject of a Rattigan play was Alexander the Great, Lord Nelson or Lawrence of Arabia, his biographer maintains his characters all spoke in the dated idiom of Rattigan’s schoolmates at Harrow and Oxford, or in the affected cadences of his Mayfair cronies. To Young, Rattigan was the eternal Peter Pan, unable and unwilling to leave the Delectable Island that had furnished him with the material for his precocious fame. Though the plots grew increasingly complex, the characters remained essentially frivolous, even after the revolution in British Theater following Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” Arnold Wesker’s proletarian plays, the elliptical dramas of Harold Pinter, and the warm reception accorded to the works of Christopher Hampton, Trevor Griffith and Peter Nichols. According to Young, neither “plays of ideas” nor the notion of “fine writing” interested Rattigan in the slightest degree, and the only ideas he cultivated were those “necessary to live a civilized upper-middle-class life.”

Though “The Rattigan Version” is liberally sprinkled with names of the great and near-great, the book is hardly anecdotal. Gielgud, Olivier, Margaret Leighton, Maurice Evans, Rex Harrison and the Lunts are hustled on and off stage like so many bit players, with only the scantiest mention of their reactions to the Rattigan scripts to which they lent their talents. We’re given only the barest facts of Rattigan’s life, which Young calls generally free of excitement, pathos or tragedy.

Beyond suggesting that the relationships between men and women in the Rattigan plays might be based upon the author’s homoerotic romances, Young offers few interpretations. Apparently regarding the Rattigan canon as shallow and overrated, Young never pauses to reexamine his own preconceptions, unequivocally stated in the introduction. “His easy success in the theater was all that he won. He was indeed a successful playwright, but no more than that. . . . All his life, his relationships with his fellow human beings were fundamentally the relationships of a schoolboy.” Damming Rattigan with faint praise from the outset, Young concludes this ambivalent overview with a chilly paean to the playwright’s consistency:

“It was entirely to his credit that he should continue to write what he thought the public wanted to hear, when the critics were attacking him for it”; courting the favor of that imaginary Aunt Edna to the end, struggling to please the phantom who was not only his muse but his alter ego.