Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work

'Rattigan's work is a sustained assault on English Middle-Class Values: fear of Emotional Commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex. Few dramatists this century have written with more understanding about the human heart.' Michael Billington In his lifetime he was a well known public figure, yet despite his friendships with people such as Noel Coward he always publicly hit his homosexuality. In this extensively revised biography Michael Darlow has, for the first time, been able to describe this important aspect of his life and fully consider it in relation to his work. Plays such as French Without Tears, The Browning Version, Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy are some of the best loved and most memorable plays of the century. Yet even in his lifetime Rattigan was regarded as somehow artistically suspect. Revised to celebrate the centenary of Rattigan's birth, this portrait of a complex and fascinating man unfolds to provide a compelling case for him to be accepted as one of the great dramatists of the last century.

Here, scarcely five years after Geoffrey Wansell's Terence Rattigan (LJ 5/15/97), Darlow revises the pioneering 1979 biography he and Gillian Hodson wrote about Sir Terence Rattigan (1911-77), the most commercially and artistically successful British playwright of the period 1936-55. Wansell's book is slightly more detailed on Rattigan's life, perhaps unnecessarily so. On the other hand, Darlow, as a former actor and director, is a finer literary and theatrical critic, and he incorporates information about the considerable Rattigan revival of the 1990s. He focuses on suggesting, usually convincingly, that Rattigan's personal life was frequently transmuted into his plays. A believer in Rattigan's place among the century's most important nonexperimental playwrights, he acknowledges Rattigan's artistic limitations, personal weaknesses, public relations blunders, and constant eye on commercial success. Recommended for larger public and academic theater, drama, and gay studies collections.DRobert W. Melton, Univ. of Kansas Libs., Lawrence
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Rattigan deserves to be better known. One of the most popular mid-twentieth-century English playwrights and the strongest voice of the generation that fought the Nazis, he wrote such lyrical plays as French without Tears and The Winslow Boy . To the talented next generation of Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and others, however, he was reactionary, self-satisfied, the voice of the English mainstream. When he died in 1977, theater progressives regarded him as a relic. Lately, interest in him has revived, with David Mamet's well-received film of The Winslow Boy and now a fine biography. Darlow sweeps through Rattigan's life, from childhood as the son of a pompous, womanizing civil servant to early successes on West End stages to later triumphs to disappointment as the younger generation passed him by. He impressively avoids becoming lost in details and, though thoroughly steeped in Rattigan's work, never allows literary analysis to weigh things down. Carefully balancing discussions of the major plays and pure biography, he crafts a book to please Rattigan fanciers and general readers alike. Jack Helbig
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