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thisbluespiritSince I've been trying to watch (or listen to) all of the Rattigans lately, this seems like a good topic for a post!
Who was Rattigan?
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) was an English playwright and screenwriter, whose most famous works are The Browning Version (1948), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) & Separate Tables (1954). His works are usually sharply observed, low-key character pieces, mostly v middle-class background*, one of a combination of factors that caused him to fall from favour in the wake of Osborne's Look Back in Anger in the 50s. He wrote for (low-brow!) cinema, radio and TV too, another factor. Since the 90s in particular he's been recognised as one of the 20th C greats, via several major revivals of many of his works and you'd be hard pressed to find a year now when some major British theatre or other isn't putting on a Rattigan.
He was gay, which is evident in many of his plays, although usually more implicitly than explicitly - the most explicit use of a gay character, in Separate Tables, he censored himself prior to its Broadway performance. From 1998, though, happily, modern productions have usually restored the original version. The Browning Version isn't explicit, but is very much about queerness, too.
I came across him when my teacher gave us The Browning Version for A-Level, and instantly fell in love, even if it took me thirty-odd years to finally get up and try some of the rest of his plays. I think I was worried that they wouldn't be as good or would contain aspects that might spoil TBV for me - happily, as you can see, I needn't have worried!
What do I love about his works?
He's very much all about character pieces, especially small-scale, claustrophobic ones (which the theatre naturally tends towards), in a way that I really love.
His first success was the farce French Without Tears (1936), so between that and the screen-writing, he's a very easy watch, in the best sense - his dialogue says so much about character, and often still feels fresh, and he can do light comedy as well as the more serious pieces. You'll often find variations on mismatched marriages, moral choices, people from different positions finding understanding of each other, and trial by the media in one form or another. His characterisation is always well-rounded and complex.
The thing I love the most, though, is his characteristic trick of having so much of the mood or conclusion or character shift on a literal sixpence - one small item, or action, or change of point of view leads to an uplift of hope we didn't expect - and on rare occasions, the reverse, acting as the last spiteful straw. The gift of a book, the discovery of a letter, love of art - how big small things can be to us humans.
I'll talk about specific plays if I carry on with this meme, I'm sure, but I definitely think he's worth trying out if you haven't already. There are a range of adaptations around, new and old, (TV, film, Radio, some of which he wrote the screenplays for himself), as well as current theatre productions.
The National Theatre has a really nice little two-part intro to five of his major works (spoilery, though, as ever with these things) - I presume this means they have some Rattigans on their At Home service, too. If you wanted to try a live production, The Winslow Boy or The Browning Version are particularly good starting places.
(Warnings - not many! He's not a bleak writer at all as a rule, but suicide does crop up in various ways in After the Dance, The Deep Blue Sea, Cause Celebre, and Man and Boy; and In Praise of Love has a character with a terminal illness - leukaemia, which he had himself).
The last thing of his I watched was Heart to Heart, a 1962 BBC TV screenplay written to launch one of their anthologies - it deals again with mismatched marriages, trial by the media, and an attempt to do the right thing that isn't very successful, but at the end, the main character, learning that out of nearly 300 people who phoned into the TV station after a broadcast, 3 of them got the point: "That's something," he says. "They must be very interesting people."
How very Rattigan. ♥
* He attended Harrow, although wiki, if it is to be believed, says that while he was there, he was in its Officer Training Course and started a mutiny, which is brilliant if it's true. <3
Who was Rattigan?
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) was an English playwright and screenwriter, whose most famous works are The Browning Version (1948), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) & Separate Tables (1954). His works are usually sharply observed, low-key character pieces, mostly v middle-class background*, one of a combination of factors that caused him to fall from favour in the wake of Osborne's Look Back in Anger in the 50s. He wrote for (low-brow!) cinema, radio and TV too, another factor. Since the 90s in particular he's been recognised as one of the 20th C greats, via several major revivals of many of his works and you'd be hard pressed to find a year now when some major British theatre or other isn't putting on a Rattigan.
He was gay, which is evident in many of his plays, although usually more implicitly than explicitly - the most explicit use of a gay character, in Separate Tables, he censored himself prior to its Broadway performance. From 1998, though, happily, modern productions have usually restored the original version. The Browning Version isn't explicit, but is very much about queerness, too.
I came across him when my teacher gave us The Browning Version for A-Level, and instantly fell in love, even if it took me thirty-odd years to finally get up and try some of the rest of his plays. I think I was worried that they wouldn't be as good or would contain aspects that might spoil TBV for me - happily, as you can see, I needn't have worried!
What do I love about his works?
He's very much all about character pieces, especially small-scale, claustrophobic ones (which the theatre naturally tends towards), in a way that I really love.
His first success was the farce French Without Tears (1936), so between that and the screen-writing, he's a very easy watch, in the best sense - his dialogue says so much about character, and often still feels fresh, and he can do light comedy as well as the more serious pieces. You'll often find variations on mismatched marriages, moral choices, people from different positions finding understanding of each other, and trial by the media in one form or another. His characterisation is always well-rounded and complex.
The thing I love the most, though, is his characteristic trick of having so much of the mood or conclusion or character shift on a literal sixpence - one small item, or action, or change of point of view leads to an uplift of hope we didn't expect - and on rare occasions, the reverse, acting as the last spiteful straw. The gift of a book, the discovery of a letter, love of art - how big small things can be to us humans.
I'll talk about specific plays if I carry on with this meme, I'm sure, but I definitely think he's worth trying out if you haven't already. There are a range of adaptations around, new and old, (TV, film, Radio, some of which he wrote the screenplays for himself), as well as current theatre productions.
The National Theatre has a really nice little two-part intro to five of his major works (spoilery, though, as ever with these things) - I presume this means they have some Rattigans on their At Home service, too. If you wanted to try a live production, The Winslow Boy or The Browning Version are particularly good starting places.
(Warnings - not many! He's not a bleak writer at all as a rule, but suicide does crop up in various ways in After the Dance, The Deep Blue Sea, Cause Celebre, and Man and Boy; and In Praise of Love has a character with a terminal illness - leukaemia, which he had himself).
The last thing of his I watched was Heart to Heart, a 1962 BBC TV screenplay written to launch one of their anthologies - it deals again with mismatched marriages, trial by the media, and an attempt to do the right thing that isn't very successful, but at the end, the main character, learning that out of nearly 300 people who phoned into the TV station after a broadcast, 3 of them got the point: "That's something," he says. "They must be very interesting people."
How very Rattigan. ♥
* He attended Harrow, although wiki, if it is to be believed, says that while he was there, he was in its Officer Training Course and started a mutiny, which is brilliant if it's true. <3
no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 07:37 pm (UTC)They have the late great Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea!
For anyone who wants to rent it individually rather than getting a subscription:
https://www.ntathome.com/products/the-deep-blue-sea
(ETA: forgot to say, thank you for this lovely and informative post; Deep Blue Sea is the only Rattigan I've seen.)
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Date: 2025-11-29 09:05 pm (UTC)ETA: forgot to say, thank you for this lovely and informative post; Deep Blue Sea is the only Rattigan I've seen.
Oh, well, then, I do recommend The Browning Version - it's v different to DBS in many ways, but in others they're such a fascinating coin flip of each other. You may have access to a more recent production, but the 1980s BBC one with Ian Holm and Judi Dench is still great, if you can get your hands on it.
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Date: 2025-11-29 10:49 pm (UTC)Seconding The Browning Version, whose 1951 film I love so much I have never managed to write about it.
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Date: 2025-11-29 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 08:33 pm (UTC)I loved their 2016 The Deep Blue Sea, which I saw NT Live for my birthday that year and never wrote about except in feverish e-mails to friends. It had a strong contender for my favorite Miller, speaking of queerness in the plays of Terence Rattigan.
At at the end, the main character, learning that out of nearly 300 people who phoned into the TV station after a broadcast, 3 of them got the point. "That's something," he says. "They must be very interesting people."
Exactly!
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Date: 2025-11-29 09:07 pm (UTC)Aw, yes. It sounds like a great production!
"That's something," he says. "They must be very interesting people."
Exactly!
Hopefully, I will get to this in my watching posts, because I really enjoyed it. It was my last main unwatched thing on the BBC Rattigan boxset and I hoped it would be a great way to end it, and it was.
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Date: 2025-11-29 09:30 pm (UTC)Nick Fletcher: slight, grey-rumpled, an unimpeachable straight face and a faint but ineradicable German accent, double-marginalized; half the time he hardly sounds sympathetic, answering all questions with a killing lack of interest in the surrounding drama, and he hopes to see Hester in the morning. I loved him.
It was my last main unwatched thing on the BBC Rattigan boxset and I hoped it would be a great way to end it, and it was.
It sounds like the perfect grace note for the Rattigan audience.
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Date: 2025-11-30 09:07 am (UTC)I haven’t heard of any major revivals of TWB in the last few years, but I would be desperate to go and see it live if it ever comes back to the West End or similar (I very rarely go to the theatre because Stress, but I’d be prepared to make an exception in this case xD)
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Date: 2025-11-30 10:41 am (UTC)Aw, thank you! And it really is my favourite thing about his writing. One small act, or discovery and it flips around how the characters see things, or we as the audience, or gives people the courage to go on - you see it in TWB's ending very much, between the discovery about Sir Robert and the winning of the case.
The Browning Version is always a good place to start - it's a brilliant one-act piece about a public school master who's about to retire. There seems to be a full copy of the 1951 Michael Redgrave film on YT here, which has some extra material and is a little gentler than the play, but it was adapted by Rattigan himself, and is just lovely. (If you want to see the play straight up there's a 1980s BBC version with Ian Holm and Judi Dench, which is excellent, although it's not anywhere online I can see at the moment, but there are a whole bunch of BBC radio productions from over the years scattered about on YT and other places).
If you don't mind radio productions, these are two others I think might be up your alley (the first with a wartime caveat, of course):
I hadn't heard of The Flare Path before I started exploring his full works as far as I could, but it's also lovely; I think you'd enjoy it, although it does depend how close it comes to the war issue. It is set in WWII at an RAF base (Rattigan was in the RAF at the time), but it's mostly centred around a night with the people waiting on the ground to see who will return the next morning, which changes several people's outlook on their relationships and situations. The only film adaptation is very different (Rattigan effectively completely remixed himself for it, and it's supposed to be wonderful too, but I still have to watch my copy) but I got into it via this radio play. I note that it seems to be increasingly picked up by theatre companies over the last 10-15 years, so it's obviously not just me that thinks it ought to be up there with some of the rest!
Ditto on The Sleeping Prince being unknown to me - it is a very light piece, but has enough bittersweet and humour to balance out the froth, I think, and its heading for a dubious seduction is beautifully subverted and then bookended in reverse by Rattigan. Anyway, in Edwardian England, an Eastern European prince (Peter Wyngarde) picks out a chorus girl (Millicent Martin) for obvious reasons, but gets either entirely the wrong one or the right one, depending on how you look at it, and she winds up accidentally sorting out his life instead. The only film version that exists stars Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe and is supposed to be not very good, although I haven't seen it. But the Wyngarde-Martin SNT radio play is defnitely charming and bittersweet - it is just a fairytale and the leads know that at the end as well as we do. I think you might possibly also have fun with it.
But, yeah, TBV is always a good one to try! A lot of people would agree it's his masterpiece (including David Mamet on TWB commentary). Plus, it's short!
And, aw, I hope a new TWB does come for you soon & that you make it. It ought to, really. It's such a lovely play. I don't suppose they'll neglect it forever.
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Date: 2025-11-30 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-01 01:33 pm (UTC)The only Rattigan I've seen is the 1961 version of Adventure Story, of which its subtext now makes total sense! Of course it was deliberate!
(Seperate Tables is the one I'm most interested in seeing, but alas, they didn't film the stage production from 1966. The 1958 film does have a great cast.)
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Date: 2025-12-01 08:36 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely! XD
Seperate Tables is the one I'm most interested in seeing, but alas, they didn't film the stage production from 1966. The 1958 film does have a great cast.
There are a few versions about that are supposed to be good, although I think all of them are pre-1990s, so bear in mind they will have the het version of the Major's crimes. But it's a good one - it's two connected one-act plays and the leads usually play the (very different) main parts in both sections. So it is a shame you can't have the cast you're after because it's a fun test of an actor's ability!
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Date: 2025-12-01 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-01 08:40 pm (UTC)Ha, I'm so glad! That was exactly what I meant to do with the Fandom 50 thing - explain myself a bit more! I mean, I usually do somewhere at the start, but that can be v briefly or 15 years ago sometimes, so... Good to know it's proving useful!
And (maybe) unlike some of my more random loves, Rattigan is well worth knowing about, I think.