SOURCE: Foulkes, Richard. “Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme.” Modern Drama XXII, no. 4 (December 1979): 375-82.

[In the following essay, Foulkes explores Rattigan's recurring theme of the love triangle and its influence on his work.]

In the preface to the second volume of his Collected Plays, Terence Rattigan recalls an early attempt at play-writing as a fourteen-year-old in a junior form at Harrow. The playlet was in French, and for it he was awarded two marks out of ten and the comment: “French execrable: theatre sense first class.” The youthful Rattigan's flair for dramatic effect is clear from the scenario which he recalled in later life: “I … plunged straight into the climactic scene of some plainly very turgid tragedy. The Comte de Boulogne, driven mad by his wife's passion for a handsome young gendarme, rushes in to the Comtesse's boudoir where she sits at her dressing-table having her hair done by three maids (in those days I was less economical in my use of small parts than I have since become). …”¹

In retrospect, the subject matter of this adolescent piece is noteworthy not so much for its precocity as for its prescience, for it embodies the theme to which Rattigan was to return time and again throughout his creative life. In play after play, Rattigan explores the triangular situation of a character torn between the rival claims of two potential partners. In Flare Path, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Variation on a Theme, Cause Célèbre, and the film The Yellow Rolls-Royce, it is a woman torn between an older man and a younger; in Who Is Sylvia?, While the Sun Shines, Love in Idleness and A Bequest to the Nation, it is a man who is similarly torn between two women; and, just occasionally, Rattigan runs the gamut of conformity by presenting a character torn between the attractions of two rivals of different sexes, as in First Encounter and Variation on a Theme.

The eternal triangle is, of course, a time-honoured theme, and like most dramatic situations, it has been used for both tawdry sensationalism and sensitive exploration of character. Thus, it is for his handling of this recurring theme rather than for the theme itself that Rattigan must be judged. Of the various triangular situations enumerated above, it is the first that has proved most fertile for Rattigan—the woman married to an older man finding herself possessed by a deep and apparently uncontrollable passion for a younger man. This is the situation in three of his most accomplished works: The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Cause Célèbre. In each of these, Rattigan uses the triangular situation to explore the nature of those emotions defined by that “portmanteau word” love, contrasting the passion which the woman feels for her young lover with the much more restrained, inhibited feelings which she has, or had, for her husband.

It is significant that for his first major exploration of this theme, Rattigan should create a drama which depends for its full effect upon powerful classical reverberations, for such is the case with The Browning Version. The “version” referred to is, of course, Robert Browning's version of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, through which the public schoolmaster, Andrew Crocker-Harris, is guiding his enthusiastic but not very accurate pupil Taplow (a shade of Rattigan himself). As Taplow enthuses over The Agamemnon—“it's rather a good plot, really, a wife murdering her husband and having a lover and all that”²—we become aware of the parallels between Crocker-Harris, his wife, Millie, her lover, Frank Hunter, and their counterparts in the classical drama. Not that Millie adopts the crude physical weapons of Clytemnestra; instead, she uses the no less deadening battery of psychological warfare as she relentlessly humiliates and degrades her husband. In terms of exploration of character and motive, The Browning Version is closer to Euripides and his treatment of that other archetypal triangle (Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus) in Hippolytus than to Aeschylus's bloody chain of murder and revenge.

By making the husband in his drama a classical scholar of considerable, albeit unrealised, distinction, Rattigan has created a character who might plausibly be expected to analyse his situation and articulate it. This is what Crocker-Harris does in a key speech at the end of the play:

You see, my dear Hunter, she is really quite as much to be pitied as I. We are both of us interesting subjects for your microscope. Both of us needing from the other something that would make life supportable for us, and neither of us able to give it. Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart, as I know now, though when I married her I didn't think they were incompatible. In those days I hadn't thought that her kind of love—the love she requires and which I was unable to give her—was so important that its absence would drive out the other kind of love—the kind of love that I require and which I thought, in my folly, was by far the greater part of love. I may have been, you see, Hunter, a brilliant classical scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the facts of life. I know better now, of course. I know that in both of us, the love that we should have borne each other has turned to bitter hatred. That's all the problem is. Not a very unusual one, I venture to think—not nearly as tragic as you seem to imagine. Merely the problem of an unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband. You'll find it all over the world. It is usually, I believe, a subject for farce.³

“Brilliant classical scholar” that he was, Crocker-Harris must have been aware of the serious thought given to this problem of the “two kinds of love” by the writers of antiquity, not only by the dramatists, but more especially by philosophers, particularly Plato; and indeed, the scholar's whole speech is nothing less than an exposition of the view of love put forward by Pausanias in The Symposium:

If there were a single Aphrodite there would be a single Love, but as there are two Aphrodites, it follows that there must be two Loves as well. Now what are the two Aphrodites? One is the elder and is the daughter of Uranus and had no mother; her we call Heavenly Aphrodite. The other is younger, the child of Zeus and Dione, and is called Common Aphrodite. It follows that the Love which is the partner of the latter should be called Common Love and the other Heavenly Love.⁴

Thus, in his marriage Crocker-Harris has seen his own aspiration to “Heavenly Aphrodite” stymied by his wife's increasing absorption in “Common Aphrodite.” Of the “two sorts of ruling or guiding principle …” expressed by Socrates in Phaedrus, Crocker-Harris might be said to represent “an acquired judgment that … guides us rationally towards what is best …”; his wife, “an innate desire for pleasure[;] … the name given to that rule is wantonness.”⁵

The situation in The Deep Blue Sea is closely analogous to that in The Browning Version, and though the classical foundations are not as self-evident as in the earlier play, they still inform its whole texture. Like Crocker-Harris, Sir William Collyer—a judge—has failed to satisfy the other kind of love for which his younger wife, Hester, feels need, and she, like Millie, has sought comfort elsewhere in the former R.A.F. pilot Freddie Page. Again, it is the problem of the two kinds of love that has afflicted Hester with her husband: “Oh, I'm not denying you married for love—for your idea of love. And so did I—for my idea of love. The trouble seems to be they weren't the same ideas. You see, Bill—I had more to give you—far more—than you ever wanted from me.”⁶ Collyer dismisses his wife's feelings for Freddie as “lust” and exhorts her to “exert every effort of will you're capable of in order to return to sanity at once,”⁷ in other words, to return to the principle of judgement and self-discipline advocated by Socrates in Phaedrus and embodied, as befits his professional calling, by Collyer himself. But, as Hester movingly testifies, she, like Phaedra before her, has gone to elaborate lengths in order to suppress her feelings for her lover and to avoid meeting him. Furthermore, she denounces the notion that because her relationship with Freddie is founded on sexual attraction, it should be denied that “portmanteau word” love. On her side, at least; for, in the classic tradition, her young lover does not reciprocate her feelings in like manner, and in a speech to his R.A.F. crony Jackie Jackson, shows himself to be a victim of the same dilemma as Crocker-Harris, and indeed, Hester's estranged husband: “But look at it this way, Jackie. Take two people—‘A’ and ‘B’—‘B’ doesn't love ‘A’, or at least not in the same way. He wants to, but he just can't. It's not his nature. Now ‘B’ hasn't asked to be loved. He may be a perfectly ordinary bloke, kind, well-meaning, good friend, perhaps even a good husband if he's allowed to be. But he's not allowed to be—that's my point. Demands are made on him which he just can't fulfil. If he tries, he's cheating, and cheating doesn't help anyone.”⁸

The destructive effect of Hester's, and Millie's, “Common Love,” and its apparent incompatibility with the “Heavenly Love” sought by Crocker-Harris and Collyer, emerge clearly from these two plays. In his last completed play, Cause Célèbre, Rattigan returns with renewed insight and imagination to the two loves and achieves arguably his most accomplished exploration of the theme which had preoccupied him for so long. In Cause Célèbre, Rattigan takes as his source a famous trial of the 1930s in which Alma Victoria Rattenbury, thirty-eight, was tried with her lover, George Percy Stoner (Rattigan changed his name to Wood), for the murder of her sixty-eight-year-old husband. Alongside this part of the play, which, as we shall see, follows the facts of the case very closely, Rattigan creates the character of Edith Davenport, chairman of the jury at the trial, her estranged husband, and her son, Tony, about the same age as Wood. The play was first written for radio and later rewritten for the stage, and although the revisions in the later version were occasioned partly by the change in medium, some indicate a further refining of the central theme of the play.

The amazing appropriateness of Alma Victoria Rattenbury for the role in which Rattigan casts her extends even to her name, of which he occasions her to say: “Do you know what Alma means in Latin? A professor told me once, it means life-giving, bountiful. In olden times they used it about goddesses, like Venus. (Sipping her drink.) Well I'm not Venus, God knows—but apparently it also means kind and comforting, and that I am, George, though I say it who shouldn't. …”⁹

Alma Rattenbury also wrote love songs of striking suitability to the play, such as “Dark-Haired Marie” and “Night Brings You to Me.” Indeed, scarcely ever can a character drawn from life have served her author's purposes so appositely, for as F. Tennyson Jesse writes in her introduction to the transcript of the trial: “That worst of all Anglo-Saxon attitudes, a contemptuous condemnation of the man and woman, but more particularly the woman, unfortunate enough to be found out in sexual delinquency, never had finer scope than was provided by the Rattenbury case.”¹⁰ Tennyson Jesse further highlights the appropriateness of the case for Rattigan's exploration of the nature of love: “The expression ‘falling in love’ is an attempt to define something which escapes definition. Mankind has a natural weakness for labels, for they simplify life, and though this particular label is one of the most pernicious which has been evolved, it must be remembered that it covers not only a multitude of sins, but of virtues. Perhaps no two people would give quite the same definition of its meaning.”¹¹

In her introduction, Tennyson Jesse goes so far as to apply to Alma's passion for Stoner a label from which Rattigan had shrunk in the cases of Millie and Hester, though it denotes something which is probably latent in them: “Mrs. Rattenbury was a highly sexed woman, and six years of being deprived of sexual satisfaction had combined with the tuberculosis from which she suffered, to bring her to the verge of nymphomania.” She goes on to point out that: “She was fond of her husband in a friendly fashion, and he was devoted to her, very interested in her song-writing and anxious for her to succeed.”¹² The couple therefore enjoyed a degree of companionship and affection even though their relationship had ceased to operate on a personal level. Tennyson Jesse also confronts the question of who holds the balance of domination between an older woman and a younger man: “The actual truth is that there is no woman so under the dominion of her lover as the elderly mistress of a very much younger man.”¹³ Thus, Alma expresses from the dock a view with which her dramatic predecessors Millie and Hester would heartily concur: “Ever since this case began the one thing I've heard is how I must have dominated this—boy. Well I can only say that if anyone dominated anyone else, it was George who dominated me. …”¹⁴

Tailor-made though the Rattenbury case was for Rattigan's purpose, some changes became necessary. In The Winslow Boy, Rattigan wrote a court-room drama which took place entirely outside the court, and to a certain extent he was obliged to do the same in Cause Célèbre, a play in which he shows himself master of a much freer form of dramatic construction. Stoner was not called to give evidence in court, so Rattigan constructs scenes between Wood and his lawyer in which Wood's assertion—the basis of his defence—that he was a cocaine, addict is shown to be untrue. Another crucial scene between Alma and her elder son, Christopher, takes place outside the courtroom but determines Alma's behaviour in court when, reluctantly, she ceases to shield Wood. However, it is in Wood and Alma's avowal of their love for each other (not merely “lust,” as Collyer would argue), their attempts to shield each other, and the play's predetermined climax, that Rattigan is best served by his source. Kenneth Tynan roundly criticised Rattigan for denying Hester her suicide in The Deep Blue Sea, a decision which Rattigan stoutly defended.¹⁵ In Cause Célèbre, Alma's suicide is foreknown, and the fact that it takes place shortly before Stoner receives his reprieve endows it with its own inbuilt dramatic irony. Furthermore, Alma Rattenbury's own letters written just before she killed herself have a lyricism which Rattigan, the earnest upholder of everyday speech, had eschewed hitherto. Indeed, in the following passage, reproduced with some varying omissions by Rattigan, it is life that transcends art:

Eight o'clock. After so much walking I have got here. Oh to see the swans and spring flowers and just smell them. And how singular I should have chosen the spot Stoner said he nearly jumped out of the train once at. It was not intentional my coming here. I tossed a coin, like Stoner always did, and it came down Christchurch. It is beautiful here. What a lovely world we are in! It must be easier to be hanged than to have to do the job oneself, especially in these circumstances of being watched all the while. Pray God nothing stops me to-night. Am within five minutes of Christchurch now. God bless my children and look after them.¹⁶

In the section of the play dealing with Edith Davenport, Rattigan was free to create characters unfettered by considerations of historical accuracy, and the scenes in which she and her family take part were most extensively revised between the radio and stage versions. In the radio play, Mrs. Davenport does not appear until the Rattenbury ménage has been well-established, and she plays no part in the climax. In the stage version, she and Alma are immediately juxtaposed in the opening sequence, and Alma's suicide is punctuated by Mrs. Davenport's reactions to it. In both versions, Mrs. Davenport embodies repressive attitudes towards sex; in her marriage, it is she who is unable to accommodate the “Common Love,” the sexual drive of which her husband is possessed, and she is suing him for divorce. It is no accident that Rattigan makes her the daughter of a judge, symbol of the qualities of judgement and restraint embodied by Collyer, in stark contrast to Alma Rattenbury's indulgence.

Collyer and Crocker-Harris are products of an educational system, of which the latter is still an agent, which has as its moral foundation the tenets of self-discipline and fellowship drawn from antiquity and inculcated by a classically based curriculum. Until he wrote Cause Célèbre, Rattigan had concerned himself principally with the products of such an educational system (of which he was an example). But in the creation of Mrs. Davenport's son, Tony, he explores the effects of that system on a boy whose age is the same as Wood's, but whose class singles him out for a very different upbringing. In the radio version, he is at school near Bournemouth (where the Rattenburys lived), and a brief scene shows the excitement generated by the case among the boys, who contrast Wood's sexual indulgence with their own limited opportunities. Tony Davenport is the object of admiration by a younger Siamese schoolfellow, and to his avowal “Purely platonic,” another boy ripostes: “If you were in the classical sixth you'd learn what Platonic really meant.”¹⁷ Mrs. Davenport seems to regard such a relationship as less dangerous than one with a member of the opposite sex, and so embraces the Platonic distinction between Heavenly Love and Common Love in its sexual exclusivism far more purely than any other Rattigan character. The outcome of his mother's attitudes for Tony is a fruitless visit to a prostitute and a golfing holiday in Scotland with the Siamese princeling.

In the stage version, some of Rattigan's changes were clearly determined by practical considerations (the scene at the school, the visit to the prostitute were omitted). But more significantly, he heightens the drama of Tony's visit to a prostitute by making the visit a “successful” one and dwelling on the results as the boy reluctantly discloses to his mother the disease from which he is suffering as a result of his visit, itself a result of her sexual repression. The destructive effect of sexual repression is emphasised when we learn that Tony has attempted suicide, and during a visit to Mrs. Davenport, her husband contrasts her attitudes with those of the woman whose case she is trying: “I don't give much for her chances with you judging her. I don't know anything about Mrs. Rattenbury, except what I've read in the papers, but that's enough to tell me that her vices, which I am sure are deplorable, do add up to some kind of affirmation. Your virtues, Edie, which I know are admirable, add up to precisely nothing. Goodbye!”¹⁸

In the event, of course, Mrs. Davenport does find Alma innocent of murder, and the stage play ends with her drunken exclamation: “I gave you life.” Thus, at the end of his career, and, as he realised, near the end of his life, Rattigan found characters and a narrative which were supremely suited to the further exploration of a theme which had absorbed him for so long. Through his creation of the complementary character of Edith Davenport, he was able to present concurrently the two kinds of love, the “heavenly” and the “common,” in the Platonic definition. It may well be that in Mrs. Davenport's final verdict in favour of Alma is to be found Rattigan's personal resolution of this time-honoured conflict. Whether or not Cause Célèbre proves to be the masterpiece to which Rattigan aspired, only time will tell, but it indubitably constitutes a fitting summation to the exploration of a theme which haunted Rattigan throughout his career as a dramatist and which gives to his work a cogency and consistency unmatched amongst his peers in the English theatre.

Notes

1. Terence Rattigan, Collected Plays (London, 1953), II, p. vii.

2. Terence Rattigan, The Browning Version, in Collected Plays, II, p. 7.

3. Ibid., pp. 44-45.

4. W. Hamilton, trans., The Symposium (Harmondsworth, 1951), pp. 45-46.

5. R. Hackforth, trans., Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 38-39.

6. Terence Rattigan, The Deep Blue Sea, in Collected Plays, II, p. 354.

7. Ibid., p. 338.

8. Ibid., p. 329.

9. Terence Rattigan, Cause Célèbre (London, 1978), p. 10.

   I am indebted to Dr. Jan van Loewen for the loan of typescripts of both the radio and stage scripts of Cause Célèbre. References to the radio script are to the typed manuscript; those to the stage version, to the published edition.

10. F. Tennyson Jesse, ed., The Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner (London, 1935), p. 4.

11. Ibid., p. 7.

12. Ibid., p. 5.

13. Ibid., p. 13.

14. Cause Célèbre, stage version, p. 68.

15. See Kenneth Tynan, Tynan on Theatre (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 20-21; and Terence Rattigan, Collected Plays, II, p. xvii.

16. F. Tennyson Jesse, p. 295. Rattigan used this letter as the basis for Alma's suicide speech in both versions, but varied his editing of it.

17. Terence Rattigan, Cause Célèbre, radio script, p. 19.

18. Terence Rattigan, Cause Célèbre, stage script, p. 49.