Terence Rattigan: A Biography

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 31 MAR 1997

"I was very moved by this play," Winston Churchill said of Rattigan's wartime R.A.F. drama, Flare Path. "It's a masterpiece of understatement. But we are rather good at that, aren't we?" Rattigan (1911-1977), who would become unfashionable when the well-made play was eclipsed in the 1950s and '60s by absurdist and angry theater, was the leading middlebrow playwright of his time, from the conformist 1930s into the permissive 1970s. Wansell, biographer of Cary Grant, sensitively shows Rattigan and his work as reflecting the emotional hold of his father, whose compulsively womanizing cost him his foreign service career, and of Rattigan's own closet homosexuality, an open secret to his intimates but not to the middle-class theatrical clientele, who saw only an insouciant bachelor. His carefree mask, essential in his day, compelled him to keep his themes of sexual obsession and repression within the limits of official stage censorship that ended only as Rattigan's career was diminishing from the peaks of The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and Separate Tables to film scripts such as The V.I.P.s and The Prince and the Showgirl. Torn between the lifestyle he craved and the dissembling one that was his, he concealed his pain under laugh lines and lavish spending, and the "necessity of concealing the truth behind a fa ade of `good behaviour' and `blameless integrity' inhabits every play he wrote," notes the author. Exploiting his access to Sir Terence's (Rattigan was knighted in 1971) papers as well as to his surviving friends, Wansell makes a persuasive case for Rattigan as a tormented personality energized into a playwright of troubled understatement. Twenty-four illustrations encompass his plays, his colleagues and his milieu.