These two one-act plays, produced as a double bill in the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s 2015–16 season at London’s Garrick Theatre, were written on either side of the great divide in Terence Rattigan’s career. Harlequinade was first produced in 1948, when Rattigan was widely regarded as Britain’s finest practising playwright; All On Her Own was written in 1968, the period when his critical reputation was at its lowest.
The contrast between the two plays could not be greater either. All On Her Own is about love and the need to feel needed, the subject to which Rattigan returned repeatedly. Harlequinade, which Rattigan described as ‘a farce of character’, is about Rattigan’s greatest love of all – the theatre.
Rattigan was born in South Kensington on 10th June 1911, the second son of the troubled marriage of Frank, a rising young diplomat, and Vera, a strong-minded Edwardian beauty. Because of his parents’ prolonged postings overseas, for much of his early life he was left in the care of a grandmother, becoming increasingly unhappy and withdrawn. Family friends came to refer to him as ‘That poor lost child, Terry Rattigan’.
He was first taken to the theatre by an aunt when he was about seven. The play was Cinderella, and he was completely captivated: ‘I believed in everything I saw on that stage… it was important to me that Cinderella should go to the ball and marry the prince.’ From that moment he became determined to become a playwright.
In 1933, while he was at Oxford, a play he had written with a fellow undergraduate, First Episode, was produced at a small theatre in Kew. With its depiction of Oxford student life – drunken parties, gambling, casual sex – it provoked a small sensation and was transferred into the West End. Buoyed up by this brush with success, Rattigan left Oxford without taking a degree and moved into a London flat to embark on a career as a dramatist. But just weeks later the play closed. Broke, Rattigan was forced to return home and throw himself on his parents’ mercy.
Although displeased by his son’s precipitate decision to leave Oxford without a degree, his father agreed to pay him a small allowance to stay at home and write plays on condition that if, after two years, he had not succeeded as a playwright he would take whatever job could be found for him.
For the next two years Rattigan wrote play after play but each one was rejected. So, with the two years up, he took a lowly hack job as a member of a team of writers kept on the payroll at Warner Brothers Studios in Teddington to write additional lines of dialogue for whatever film was in production at the studios. Then, just weeks later, his luck changed. In November 1936 one of his previously rejected comedies, French Without Tears, was rushed into production as a stopgap at the Criterion Theatre. It was a surprise smash-hit. It ran for over 1,000 performances and made Rattigan and its young cast, including Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard and Roland Culver, famous.
This sudden success after the years of rejection caused a reaction which Rattigan later described as a nervous breakdown. In the next six years he completed just two plays: Follow My Leader – co-written with a friend from Oxford, a satire on Hitler and the British policy of appeasement, which was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on the grounds that it might offend Hitler – and a drama, After the Dance, which opened in June 1939 to good notices but, with the approach of war, closed after just sixty performances.
Advised by a psychiatrist to join up and experience active service, Rattigan became an air gunner in RAF Coastal Command. The fierce concentration, shared danger and camaraderie of life in the RAF cured Rattigan’s ‘writer’s block’ and, writing in his off-duty hours, hit after hit flowed from his pen – Flare Path (1942), While the Sun Shines (1943), Love in Idleness (1944), The Winslow Boy (1946), plus the scripts for five well-received films. In 1948 came Playbill, two one-act plays – The Browning Version and Harlequinade. More successes followed, including The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954). However, by the 1950s this almost unfailing run of successes had begun to make Rattigan suspect. Surely, no playwright who was as consistently successful as he was could really be that good? A repertory theatre manager told him: ‘We so like putting on your plays here, Mr Rattigan. They pay for the good ones.’
By 1956, with the arrival of a new, younger generation, the start of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, followed by Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and the first visit to London of the Berliner Ensemble with plays by Bertolt Brecht, Rattigan’s reputation had undergone a complete sea change. Now he was seen as the standard bearer for an old, out-of-touch theatre, cut off from the realities of most ordinary people’s lives. Despite his unfailingly calm and unruffled demeanour, Rattigan had always suffered from a deep lack of self-confidence and became hugely discouraged. In the remaining twenty-one years of his life he wrote just five plays and another one-act double bill. Most of his time was given over to writing highly paid Hollywood films. His reputation only started to recover towards the end of his life and it was not until his centenary in 2011, with the dozens of revivals of his plays, seasons of his films, exhibitions, TV programmes and articles, that his qualities came to be fully recognised.
All On Her Own was the result of a 1968 BBC2 Television commission to thirteen well-known writers (others included J.B. Priestley, John Mortimer and Emlyn Williams) to write a short solo play for an actress of their choice. It owes much to Rattigan’s own experience and his reassessment of his parents’ relationship. For most of his adult life Rattigan had blamed his father for the difficulties in his parents’ marriage – his numerous affairs and often boorish attitude to his mother’s interests. But by 1967, when he started work on the play, his father was dead and his mother had become an increasingly difficult and self-centred old lady, and Rattigan had begun to suspect that the problems in the marriage had also been down to his mother; to her unbending attitudes, her buttoned-up views on sex and her unconcealed disappointment with her husband over his failed career as a diplomat – he had been forced to ‘retire early’ from the diplomatic service following a row with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, over British policy towards Turkey. The play can be seen as, in part, a portrait of his mother. But the woman in the play, Rosemary, can also be seen as a self-portrait of Rattigan himself. He, like Rosemary, was always ‘impeccably polite’. He hated rows and unpleasantness, even letting people steal from him rather than confront them. Rosemary, like Rattigan, has a deep-seated need to feel needed, a need which, in Rattigan’s case, probably had its origins in his childhood.
Harlequinade was intended as ‘the lightest soufflé’ to balance the serious drama The Browning Version in his 1948 double bill, Playbill. But it too touches on Rattigan’s deepest concerns and draws upon important events in own his life. In it a star husband and wife, Arthur and Edna Gosport, are dress-rehearsing a revival of their production of Romeo and Juliet in a theatre somewhere in the Midlands. In 1932, while at Oxford, Rattigan had been in a prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by John Gielgud. Rattigan had one line as one of the musicians who discover Juliet’s body: ‘Faith, we may put up our pipes and be gone.’ On the first night all was going well until late in the play when Rattigan played his one line. Because of the way he played it, the audience, instead of sitting frozen in suspense, roared with laughter. At each succeeding performance Rattigan tried to kill the laugh by saying the line with a different inflection but to steadily worsening effect, until the last performance when he spoke the line so quietly that no one heard it. This incident is drawn upon directly in the play. In his creation of the character of Arthur Gosport, his mannerisms, the way he conducts the rehearsal, his bounding enthusiasm, absent-mindedness and total absorption in the production to the exclusion of all else, Rattigan draws heavily on his memories of watching Gielgud at Oxford.
Another important influence was Rattigan’s experience in 1944 of working with Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne, on Love in Idleness, in which they played a couple living ‘in sin’. Rattigan wrote to his mother: ‘The atmosphere in rehearsals in which we are all living is apparently the only atmosphere in which they can work happily. It is, however, reminiscent of John Gielgud, only worse, because there are two of them.’ He describes how they remain totally charming towards each other even when they are disagreeing over a bit of business or the way a line should be played, while at the same time trying to get their own way.
In the years immediately after the war, when Rattigan was working on Harlequinade, there was a vogue for plays in verse, many with religious themes, written in language that often seemed deliberately impenetrable. The playwrights involved probably believed that they were following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, Auden and Isherwood, but unfortunately they had nothing like their talent. One particularly ripe example, which is alluded to in Harlequinade, is Ronald Duncan’s 1946 play This Way to the Tomb.
1946, the year in which Rattigan started working on Harlequinade, was the year in which the National Health Service Act and the new National Insurance Act were passed. It was also the year in which the Arts Council came into being, described by John Maynard Keynes, the principal force behind its creation, as: ‘The spiritual wing of the Welfare State, tending to the nation’s psychic health as the NHS will tend to its physical health.’ Direct government funding of the arts had begun during the war with the creation of CEMA (the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) with the aim of improving the morale of the population and promoting British culture and the values for which we were fighting. CEMA funded companies of actors, singers and dancers to perform major modern and classic plays in towns and cities around the country to audiences, many of whom had never been to the theatre before. The Old Vic relocated from London to the Grand Theatre in Burnley from where it sent out tours, led by great actors such as husband and wife Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, to play Shakespeare in Welsh mining villages and the industrial towns of the north. Among other, rather less accomplished, companies led by star husband-and-wife teams which received CEMA and, later, Arts Council funding to tour the classics around industrial areas previously deprived of the arts, was one led by Donald Wolfit and his wife Rosalind Iden. Wolfit was widely accused of being vain and of hiring inferior actors so as to ensure that he and his wife remained the centre of the audience’s attention, outshining those on stage around them. 1946 was also the year in which the Arts Council arranged for a company from the Old Vic to take over the running of the Theatre Royal in Bristol, thus creating the Bristol Old Vic.
The views expressed by Edna Selby and Jack, the stage manager, about the Arts Council and its policies are similar to those expressed by many older actors of the period and, in some respects, not unlike those of Rattigan himself. He put similar views into the mouth of ‘Aunt Edna’, a character he invented for the Introduction to Volume II of his Collected Plays in 1953, to defend his plays from the charge that because they were popular they could not be any good. Aunt Edna is, in many ways, remarkably like Rattigan’s mother, Vera. She is the unchanging theatregoer down the ages, from the Greek theatre of Sophocles, through the age of Shakespeare to the London theatre of Rattigan’s day. She does not know a great deal about the theatre, but she knows what she likes and over time, Rattigan claims, her tastes have proved an infallible barometer of what is really good and what is merely fashionable, of which plays will endure and which will not. She has strong views about the other arts as well, views similar to those expressed by Rosemary in All On Her Own.
Both All On Her Own and Harlequinade, as well as touching on relationships, issues and events of great importance to Rattigan himself, also explore concerns which remain of importance to today’s audience. Today, with our increased life expectancy, far higher incidence of relationship breakdown and of single older people living alone, Rosemary, a widow living alone, is an even more familiar figure than she would have been to audiences in the 1960s when Rattigan wrote the play.
Similarly, today the whole issue of government and local-authority funding for the arts and culture, the purpose and promised social and cultural value of such funding and the policies of the Arts Council (which are central to the putting on of the Gosports’ production of Romeo and Juliet, around which the action in Harlequinade revolves) are again very much ‘under the spotlight’. But whereas in the 1940s, when Rattigan wrote Harlequinade, the focus was on the steadily increasing amounts being spent on arts funding and the growing range of cultural initiatives involved, today the focus is on repeated cuts in government and local-authority spending on the arts and the diminishing range and scope of those activities. Nevertheless, no matter what the political climate or changing fashions in acting and production, the whole, often messy and sometimes chaotic, business of putting on a play remains timeless, essentially the same now as it was in Rattigan’s day, in the age of Shakespeare or in ancient Athens.
Neither All On Her Own nor Harlequinade may rank among the greatest works in the Rattigan canon, but they remain highly pertinent and relevant for a modern audience. Together they offer a valuable insight into Rattigan’s enduring strengths – his deep understanding of the human heart, his sure touch with comedy and his deep love for the theatre.
Michael Darlow’s biography Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work is published by Quartet Books.