This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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When your birth is announced in The Times, it generally means that you are bound for greatness, obscurity or disgrace. During the course of the 66 years that Terence Rattigan lived, he encountered the first on repeated occasions and, especially towards the end of his life, found himself in the second state in more ways than he would have been comfortable with.

If he avoided disgrace at a time when society was intolerant to his homosexuality, it was through a mixture of luck and good judgement. Yet the ever-present sense of guilt and shame that this engendered led to a remarkable degree of compassion and emotional complexity in his drama. The stiff upper lip was undercut by a heart beating in double time, more likely than not to reduce its owner — to say nothing of an audience — to helpless expressions of pathos. Rattigan was many things but, above all, he was the playwright who made grown men cry.

Not that you would have expected it from his family circumstances. His grandfather, Sir William, was a jurist and Liberal Unionist politician who became one of the first people to die in a motor accident in 1904, seven years before his grandson was born.

His father Frank, meanwhile, was an apparently respectable diplomat whose façade of upper-middle-class decorum was undercut by having an affair with Princess Elisabeth of Romania, getting her pregnant and having to procure an abortion for her.

Even as his son underwent a typically English upper-crust education at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford, Terence knew that behind the immaculate shutters of the family home in South Kensington lay complex, contradictory passions. Rattigan would become the 20th century’s most accomplished chronicler of the flawed psyche of the upper middle classes, as well as being the quintessential playwright of Englishness.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, in which Rattigan served in the RAF as a tail gunner, he had already had a West End success with his first major play, 1936’s French Without Tears, a farce about the goings-on at a language school, and the masterly 1939 drama After the Dance, exploring the afterlife of the now grown-up Bright Young Things of the Twenties. In 1942 his sentimental but highly accomplished wartime drama Flare Path was first performed.

Yet it would not be until his 1946 play The Winslow Boy that Rattigan truly hit his stride, pulling off one of the great coups de théâtre of 20th century drama. In the second act, a young naval cadet, Ronnie — the eponymous Winslow boy himself — has been expelled from the naval academy after being accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order. He is cross-examined by the country’s most sought-after and prestigious silk, Sir Robert Morton (a stand-in for Sir Edward Carson, the man who notoriously prosecuted Oscar Wilde.)

Morton tears into the unfortunate boy with the ferocity of a seasoned advocate at the bar, throwing up inconsistencies in his evidence, and building up to the suggestion, delivered in front of his outraged family, that Ronnie is nothing more than, in his words, “a forger, a liar and a thief”.

Then, just as the audience starts to assume that the remainder of the play will be an examination of the boy’s guilt and the effects it has on an affluent middle-class family, Sir Robert casually says, “Well, send all this stuff round to my chambers tomorrow morning, will you?” When the family solicitor says, with surprise, “But — but will you need it now?”, the barrister replies, “Oh, yes. The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief.”

The scene unfolds on stage for around 20 minutes and gives the actor playing Sir Robert a charismatic opportunity to dominate the stage. It shows Rattigan’s technical genius at constructing action through character (and vice versa) at its finest, and it never fails to create a stir for the audience to go away chattering into their interval gin-and-tonics. If done well, it is spellbinding.

If this moment were all that Rattigan was to be remembered for, he might now be thought of as a flashy showman, a purveyor of dramatic tricks that thrill and tantalise audiences but without any great depth to them. This is a misreading of a man who combined suave sophistication with aching longing. Rattigan was, like Morton, a romantic and a conservative, being the onetime lover of the politician and diarist Chips Channon — making multiple appearances in the Simon Heffer-edited three-volume selection of Channon’s voluminous and gossipy diaries.

He was also financially and socially conscious. When he came to write screenplays, he made a great deal of money without stretching himself artistically, his 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (co-written with Greene) aside. At one point, his witty but thin scripts for films such as 1963’s The V.I.P.s made him the highest-paid screenwriter in the world: a useful means of paying for the opulent home in Bermuda that enabled him to escape the frivolities of “Swinging London” in the Sixties and beyond.

Perhaps the most damning case against Rattigan is the fact that he aimed his plays towards a fictitious busybody of whom he wrote in 1953, “Let us invent a character, a nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music and the theatre 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’. Let us call her Aunt Edna.”

Keeping Aunt Edna happy was all-important for Rattigan. Even though he described her as a “hopeless lowbrow” who scorned the work of Kafka, Picasso and Walton, he admitted that “should he displease Aunt Edna, he is utterly lost”. Rattigan also suggested, “She will be listened to. Aunt Edna always is. The playwright who has been unfortunate or unwise enough to incur her displeasure will soon pay a dreadful price. His play, the child of his brain, will wither and die before his eyes.”

Yet this did not mean that she had to be wholly pandered to, as Rattigan explained. “Although Aunt Edna must never be made mock of, or bored, or befuddled, she must equally not be wooed, or pandered to, or cosseted. I even made a rather startling discovery; that the old dear rather enjoys a little teasing and even, at times, bullying.”

It was this tension between giving his (well-heeled, undiscerning, easily bored) audience what they want, and seeking to subvert their expectations, that lay at the heart of Rattigan’s work. On the surface, he was the undisputed master of the well-made play throughout the Forties and Fifties, offering audiences laughs, drama and a satisfying resolution to send spectators away from the theatre happy.

Today, his plays are frequently revived, usually to sell-out audiences. After several decades in which he was all but ignored in favour of more modish playwrights, it may have been a posthumous source of satisfaction to Rattigan that his work is now held in considerably higher standing than the gritty drama that largely replaced his carefully constructed drawing-room comedies, that of Osborne and Wesker and Storey.

Much of the appeal of his most famous plays, including The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea, lies in their combination of superbly crafted star parts, witty dialogue and their abiding accessibility. Few leave a Rattigan matinee and complain about not being able to understand what they have just seen. Yet, this is the safe, unchallenging reading of Rattigan, the am-dram players’ idol.

Certainly, he was every bit the middle classes’ playwright of choice. It is little wonder that the protagonists of his plays include RAF pilots, classics teachers, barristers and popular historians, to say nothing of T.E. Lawrence, the protagonist of his once-popular, now-forgotten 1960 play Ross. It was spectacularly eclipsed by David Lean’s own meditation on patriotism and honour, Lawrence of Arabia, two years later.

However, delve into any of Rattigan’s great works and you discover that there are dark, melancholy undercurrents, sometimes hidden in the wings and at others staring the audience unapologetically in the face. The Deep Blue Sea begins in the aftermath of its heroine Hester Collyer having tried and failed to kill herself, so bereft is she at having been left by her selfish younger lover, ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page.

The Browning Version revolves around its protagonist, repressed schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris, slowly coming to terms with the realisation that his life, both professional and private, has been a colossal waste of time, even as he concludes, “I am of the opinion that occasionally an anti-climax can be surprisingly effective.”

Rattigan’s final play, Cause Célèbre, addressing the Alma Rattenbury case, has been recently reassessed as a last great work, returning to many of the themes of his earlier plays: unrequited love, deception and heartbreak.

Rattigan is, for my money, the greatest playwright of heartbreak in the English language after Shakespeare. He excelled at depicting the ways in which romantic entanglements come to dominate our lives and cause otherwise sane, intelligent people to become monomaniacally fixated on relationships which, to the clear-sighted observer, seem to be barely worth pursuing.

There are any number of trivial, spoilt and silly characters in Rattigan — from Page to Crocker-Harris’s unfaithful wife Millie — who stand in contrast to the wronged, foolish but ultimately decent men and women they have deceived and hurt. Yet none of them are written as caricatures, but simply as people who lack the moral conviction and strength to commit to the dangerous, often heartsick business of loving another human being with the intensity and passion that the condition merits.

Given Rattigan’s sexuality, it is only a matter of time until his work is given the full LGBTQ+ treatment, which it has so far avoided. Certainly, there are careful hints of homosexuality throughout the plays, whether it’s the reason why Miller, the Deep Blue Sea’s sympathetic struck-off emigré doctor-turned-bookmaker’s assistant, has served time in prison — “what he did wasn’t — well — the sort of thing people forgive very easily” — or the subtext behind the reason why Major Pollock in Separate Tables faces disgrace in the seaside boarding house he is staying in.

He has been convicted of bothering a woman in a cinema, but the way in which the crime is presented and responded to reminds the alert viewer that the play was written the year after the arrest and prosecution of John Gielgud for importuning in a public lavatory.

Gielgud was fined £10, and his career hung in the balance. The Major, who has suffered “a momentary aberration”, is bound over for 12 months and is nearly ejected from his boarding house thanks to the machinations of the formidable Mrs Railton-Bell, before the compassion and decency of the other residents sees him reinstated, in much the same way that a terrified Gielgud was greeted with a standing ovation the first time that he returned to the stage after the scandal. Rattigan surely wrote the character knowing that, had circumstances been only very slightly different, he would have faced exactly the same fate as the actor, and possibly a worse one.

Rattigan’s Englishness, then, is one of decency and compassion, as well as strict rules and a sense of everyone knowing their place. (His writing of the “lower orders”, the bustling chambermaids and cheeky-chappy tradesmen, has aged rather less well than the rest.) Yet Rattigan himself was a more subversive figure than is generally recognised.

He might have had little to do with Osborne and Wesker, who would have been embarrassed to be associated with such a relic of the olden days of theatre, but he acted as an enthusiastic patron to the far more subversive — and, not coincidentally, homosexual — Joe Orton, saying of his Entertaining Mr Sloane that “I do think you’ve written the most exciting and stimulating first play that I’ve seen in 30-odd years of play going.”

Orton had created the perpetually outraged character Mrs Edna Welthorpe as a satiric response to Rattigan’s Aunt Edna, and the older man appreciated the back-handed homage. He also looked on enviously as Orton’s scabrous plays ventured into territory that his well-mannered drama could never have approached, even before Orton ended up being murdered, at the age of 34, by his disgruntled lover Kenneth Halliwell.

Rattigan, meanwhile, lived for another decade or so after Orton’s death, eventually dying from bone cancer in Bermuda in 1977 at the age of 66.

He was all too aware of what his plays could and couldn’t do. He said in 1956 to the New York Times that he was the creator “of the play that unashamedly says nothing — except possibly that human beings are strange creatures, and worth putting on the stage where they can be laughed at or cried over, as our pleasure takes us”.

This is a powerful and even noble idea, but one that was terminally unfashionable in this new age of Stoppard and Pinter, to say nothing of the angry political drama of the likes of Howard Brenton and David Hare. He had said, self-effacingly, of his involvement with Orton, “I’m a very unfashionable figure still, and I was then wildly unfashionable critically. My sponsorship rather put critics off, I think.”

No doubt there are still those who look at Rattigan as an example of white, upper-middle-class privilege and sneer both at him and his work. These types would sit through the second act of The Winslow Boy without rapt attention but instead wishing for some clumsy but politically well-intentioned piece of agitprop to give the scene “respectability”.

They are the more deceived if so. Rattigan remains one of Britain’s finest playwrights, a laureate of the inner yearnings of the human psyche. If there is anyone whose carefully constructed and emotionally devastating plays can reduce susceptible audiences to tears — with or without the presence of Aunt Edna — it is he. That, undoubtedly, is the greatest tribute to his remarkably accomplished talent.