TERENCE RATTIGAN, British playwright was born (d. 1977); One of Britain’s most popular 20th century dramatists, he was born in London, of Irish lineage, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford. His plays are generally situated within an upper middle class background; the plays were more or less pushed off the stage by the works of Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and Arden and were considered passé in the 60s, never really received his due as a playwright. Yet, his plays have held up very well, even as the reputations of his once-revolutionary successors have declined a bit. Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), an effective and masterful study of failure, may be seen as a precursor of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The horror of a particular type of marriage, in which the pain inflicted on each partner is ultimately the pleasure of both, is as fully explored in Rattigan’s one-act play as it is in Albee’s much longer drama. It is not difficult to understand why Rattigan so admired the talents of Joe Orton and was instrumental in helping to get the young writer’s early plays produced.

A recent review of a New York production of The Browning Version implied, snidely, that a more balanced view of marriage might have come from a heterosexual playwright (yeah…right). Until that review, there were probably no more than three New York theater-goers who ever conceived of Terence Rattigan as anything but straight. It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive, for example the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote The Deep Blue Sea as a play about male lovers, turning into a heterosexual play at the last minute, is unfounded. His female characters are written as females and are in no sense ‘men in drag’.

Fifteen years after his death, largely through a revival of The Deep Blue Sea, at the Almedia Theater, London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century’s great playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including Man and Boy at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu, and In Praise of Love at the Chichester Festival Theater and Separate Tables at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2006.