Morality Plays for Mid-Century or Man, God, and the Devil
[In the following essay, Rusinko analyzes how Rattigan's plays matured after the transformation in British drama in 1956, and contrasts Rattigan's work with other British playwrights of the time.]
A NEW HERO: JIMMY PORTER
During the long two-year West End run of Separate Tables, the inevitable occurred. The long-awaited stage revolution finally erupted on 8 May 1956. Its force unleashed repressions of the economic-cultural anger in post-World War II England and disrupted prevailing stage conventions. Writers, actors, directors—indeed the entire theatrical community—felt the impact of the history-making Look Back in Anger by John Osborne. Its leading character is the angry young Jimmy Porter, trapped in a dead-end existence in the midlands of England and also trapped in his marriage. For him there are no more great causes, and so he turns his frustrations and anger on his wife, genteel Alison Porter, and on their long-suffering friend, Cliff Lewis, with whom Jimmy operates a sweets stall. The people he loves most are the only means by which he can exorcise his anger. In a world of no exits, he makes them his only exit. In spite of the cruel treatment he receives, Cliff serves as a buffer between the volatile Jimmy and the passive Alison. In doing so, he becomes with Alison the object of Jimmy's frustrated passions. Bitter in his verbal and physical expression of anger, Jimmy vents his feelings on whoever and whatever are in his path. Even as one emotional upheaval subsides another is already forming, allowing its victim little or no time to recover from the previous one. Alison reels from Jimmy's love-hate actions until she can bear no more. Discovering she is pregnant, she leaves him without revealing her pregnancy. Meantime, Helena, an old actress-friend of Alison's, moves in and assumes Alison's place. At the conclusion of the play she leaves and Alison returns, having lost her child. Both she and Jimmy are exhausted from their journeys back to families and friends who love them, and they resume their life with all the illusions gone and the emotion having taken its toll on them. Both accept the truth of their cultural and psychological incompatibilities, yet realize their obsessive need for each other and that each is all the other has. They seem very close indeed to the characters of Hester Collyer and Freddie Page, Anne Shankland and John Malcolm, and other variations of these characters in Rattigan's dramas.
Yet it is Jimmy Porter who has become the legendary antihero of modern British drama. The generation of the 1930s, highly idealistic, channeled its idealism into the Spanish Civil War. The succeeding generation found similar outlet and purpose in World War II, a struggle that developed into one of sheer survival for England. In the 1950s, however, no such outlet existed for the lower-class, university-educated, intelligent, sensitive person. Jimmy can look forward to nothing beyond the running of a sweets stall in a midlands town and living in an oppressively dreary flat, ménage à trois fashion, where frustrated emotions constantly rise to the boiling point. Values seem not to exist, or they exist in a vacuum. They tend, such as they are, to be highly personal, having no connection with the existing societal structure and social consciousness. Consequently, there is not even anything to rebel against except one's self and those most intimately related. The Strindbergian torture which Jimmy imposes on Alison is his self-flagellation. For him and for her as well, the concluding reconciliation is one of exhaustion, their futures seeming not less bleak than at the beginning of the play.
Ironically, the structure and style of Osborne's play are at best conventional, and it remained for Harold Pinter, at the same time as the emergence of Osborne's antihero, to introduce the first real and certainly influential experimentation in these respects. Osborne's surfaces and dramatic narrative are naturalistic, as are Ibsen's and Strindberg's and Rattigan's. In conventional modern dramatic fashion, he takes his characters into their pasts, where the roots of the present are to be found. Like Norah of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Alison is partly revealed by her association with an animal—a squirrel, Jimmy by a bear. The secret on which the plot turns, so important to the Scribean well-made play, is Alison's pregnancy, withheld from Jimmy until late in the action. The domestic triangle of Jimmy, Alison, and Cliff (later Helena) is a 1956 version of similar marital problems in Ibsen's or Strindberg's or Rattigan's plays. The teeter-totter action of the psychological, sometimes physical, struggle contains the tensions of the well-made problem play, including the big scene, the scène à faire.
Traditional though its structure and style are, its importance lies in the no-holds-barred honesty, the sheer brutal force, and the animal magnetism that characterize the marriage of Jimmy and Alison. For the first time on the modern English stage uninhibited expression of complex passions, contradictory and violent feelings totally unleashed, with their paradoxical mixture of irrational impulses and reasoned attitudes, created a succession of emotional scenes which left the audience as drained as are the characters in the play.
The year of the play was 1956, and its stage home was the experimental Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, which became the residence not only for Osborne's plays but for other new writers whose plays could be given opportunities of production. In addition to providing such opportunities, the Royal Court enjoys historical importance in its launching of the stage revolution which was to stigmatize earlier playwrights and their work as “old-fashioned,” “French-window,” “well-made.” Rattigan felt keenly the stigma of the label and never quite recovered from the injury.
In fact, he attended the opening of Look Back in Anger, after which he made his well-known, oft-repeated comment about the impact of Osborne's play. He said that the future basis for reaction to plays would be, “Look how unlike Rattigan I'm being.” For a few critics such as Kenneth Tynan, Rattigan became the whipping boy as the embodiment of the old-fashioned play.
Yet Rattigan was not the old-fashioned playwright or the slick dramatist of public-school virtue and traditional English values, as his critics frequently accused him. For all his light-hearted comedies such as French without Tears and for all his concern with upper-middle-class characters, one can go as far back as his first play, First Episode, to begin tracing the disillusionment that would find such brutally honest expression in the lower-middle-class characters of Osborne in 1956. The disenchantment of Jimmy Porter hangs heavily in the post-World War I and pre-World War II generations in After the Dance. The common cause of World War II temporarily dissipated the emotional dissatisfactions and marital mismatches, although these were present in his war drama, Flare Path. Once more they became the subject of his dramas after the war and continued to become increasingly important with every play, reaching their highest intensity in the flawed and failed characters of Andrew Crocker-Harris, Hester Collyer, Anne Shankland and John Malcolm, Sibyl Railton-Bell and Major Pollock, Lydia and Sebastian Crutwell, and in the historical characters of Alexander, Ross, and Nelson.
The tension of Rattigan's plays essentially consists of the ambivalence created by the gap between deep-seated, complex emotional needs of the characters and their upper-middle-class sensibilities and composure which restrained them from satisfying or expressing those needs.
Consequently, the ambivalence created pain, failure, and social ostracism which forced them to find whatever means necessary to survive. However, unlike the fate of the alienated characters of the new drama, Rattigan's emphasis in resolving the problems of his characters was reintegration into the human community by means of their choice of a life in some segment of their society. Individuality and community are equally necessary forces in their lives. Isolation and alienation function only as a means toward the end of community, not as an end in themselves. The Hester Collyers and Alma Rattenburys are a means of integrating the Aunt Ednas and the Mrs. Davenports with social pariahs by the painfully slow process of increased tolerance of unconventional behavior and attitudes and by increased awareness of the emotional injury caused by ignorance, particularly in sexual and marital matters.
Curiously enough, Rattigan did not rely on the more obvious techniques of the Scribean well-made play, such as withheld secrets, to complicate his plots and create tension, frequently false and at best mechanical. What secrets may exist are openly handled and disclosed in plays such as The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Separate Tables, etc. They certainly do not constitute the big scene or the climactic moment even in the comedies.
Osborne's Look Back in Anger, on the other hand, makes obvious use of the devices. In fact, both Osborne and Joe Orton have been described as old-fashioned in structure and techniques, shockingly frank as their subject matter and language were at the time. The importance of their work was recognized by Rattigan, much as he felt injured by the peremptory critical dismissal of his own. He invested financially in Joe Orton's plays; he admired Pinter's work and was a friend of the Pinter family; he admired Osborne's work, frequently calling attention to the well-made-play style of this former actor, who epitomized all that seemed to be new, even as Rattigan became the embodiment of the old.
Finally, differences between the English stage before and after 1956 seem to consist of two major changes. One of these changes is the admission onto the stage of characters from the lower classes as worthy of serious attention, rather than as secondary, frequently comic, figures or as victims of society to be pitied. The second is the total freedom to use whatever language and experience is appropriate to the expression of that character. After repeal of censorship laws in the late 1960s, distinction between the kind of play put on by theaters such as the Royal Court and that staged by West End theaters diminished.
The new freedoms of the English stage became obvious in Rattigan's remaining plays. In particular, the next three plays illustrate a remarkable shift in subject matter that was obliquely and discreetly handled, sometimes disguised, in his earlier work. Although basic themes have not changed, their increasing complexity and closeness to real-life situations from which they are derived are more frankly sexual. He said that he wanted to “blow up the establishment” by writing a confessional play about homosexuality. At the time, a report (Wolfendon) was being prepared to begin repeal of the law which made homosexuality a crime. In fact, the report is alluded to in Variation on a Theme. His next three plays, wedged between the 1956 debut of Jimmy Porter and Rattigan's 1963 self-exile from the England stage, are open in their treatments of homosexual characters: Variation on a Theme, Ross, and Man and Boy.
VARIATION ON A THEME
Variation on a Theme (1958) appeared four years after Separate Tables, a significant fact in the light of the close succession of his plays during the 1940s and early 1950s. Certainly work on film versions of Who Is Sylvia?, The Deep Blue Sea, and The Sleeping Prince (as well as an unproduced script for Lawrence of Arabia) occupied much of his time. And although readjustments in personal affairs made claims on his time, it was the new turn of English stage history that had something to do with the four-year hiatus in his stage writing.
Whatever the reasons for the prolonged absence of a new play, Variation on a Theme, dedicated, “with deep gratitude and affection, to Margaret Leighton for whom this play was most eagerly written and by whom it was most brilliantly played” (direction by John Gielgud), opened on 8 May 1958, during a time when Osborne and Pinter were commanding the lion's share of critical attention. Even with Margaret Leighton in the leading role, however, its run, as Rattigan runs go, was a short one, contrasting with the 513 performances of The Deep Blue Sea and the 726 of Separate Tables.
Set in a villa in Cannes, France, it is the story of Rose Fish, married four times to rich husbands and on the verge of still another marriage. This time the prospective husband is a German tycoon by the name of Kurt Mast, who has acquired his wealth on the black market of World War II. Their impending marriage, however, is thwarted as a result of Rose's meeting with a ballet dancer, Anton Valov, who turns out to be Ron Vale, from the same general Birmingham origins as Rose. After dropping the assumed name and accent at the beginning of the play, he develops a relationship with Rose because he needs her money and love and she needs to give both. At the time of their meeting, Ron is involved in a homosexual relationship with Sam Duveen, director-choreographer.
In his characterization of Ron, Rattigan develops the theme of the strong influence of the younger on the older person as the main idea of the play. Ron is twenty-six and Rose is in her mid-thirties. Inequalities are compounded by Fiona, Rose's teen-age daughter by her first husband and an aspiring actress who refuses to allow Rose to love her. Only Hettie, an impoverished noblewoman who serves as Rose's loyal, paid companion, seems to reciprocate genuine love. Inequality of love relationships, particularly those in which the recipient is less than worthy of love, is richly developed in the drama. Rattigan's is, indeed, a realistic version of the nineteenth-century Camille story.
The narrative lacks the tautness of Separate Tables and is more closely allied to the looser, Chekhovian “states of being” drama in which people talk and talk. After a series of duologues in which Rose discusses her emotional needs frankly and honestly and we discover the emotional states of the other characters, Rose finally decides to leave Kurt, knowing that her living with Ron does not contain even the element of a gamble. For she knows that her ignoring the doctor's advice to move to Switzerland—she has consumption—means her imminent death. In unmelodramatic fashion she states that she's “always imagined an end far more lurid and horrifying than a winter in Cannes with a man I love more than life. More than life? Silly phrase, that—isn't it? Just a woman's exaggeration.” Her self-parody is Rattigan's way of deflating an emotionally poignant moment to avoid the possibility of mawkish sentimentality. The melodrama of this “Camille” is tempered by Rose's realistic assessment of her state and by the choice made in a responsible awareness of the consequences.
Perhaps the most revealing dialogue in the play is that between Rose and Sam as they talk about Ron, who has just left Sam for Rose. Confessing her need for loving someone even when that love cannot be returned, Rose hears Sam's explanation of Ron:
You don't seem to understand that the Rons of this world always end by hating the people they need. They can't help it. It's compulsive. Of course it probably isn't plain hate. It's love-hate, or hate-love, or some other Freudian jargon—but it's still a pretty good imitation of the real thing. You see—when day after day, night after night—you're being kicked hard and steadily in the teeth, it's not all that important what the character who's doing it feels for you. You can leave that to the psychiatrist to work out. All you can do is to nurse a broken jaw and, in your own good time, get the hell out. I'll give you six months—from the honeymoon. Take a bet?
Without passion, Sam then describes Ron's staging a phony suicide scene because of his strong jealousy of another young ballet dancer. In response to Sam's characterization of Ron's professional mediocrity and his personal liaisons, Rose explains why she has decided to stay with Ron. “It's just because his needing me is—well—the best thing that's ever happened to me, and without it I wouldn't see much point in going on living. That's not a woman's exaggeration, Sam. It's the simple truth. I can't explain why it means so much. Hettie quoted Horace at my head the other day. Something about expelling Nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes back. Meaning, I suppose, that since Birmingham I've suppressed my natural instincts, and now Nature has taken a mean revenge—”
Sam brutally accuses Rose of turning the tables on Nature “by taking a boy nine years younger than you and turning him from a fairly good virtuoso dancer into a male Rose Fish.” With conversations such as these constituting much of the play's content, Rattigan conducts an ongoing debate between nurture and nature without the lean, spare dialogue of earlier plays that leaves much of the meaning to the implicit or unspoken. Here the explicit dominates, and much of the emotional tension is dissipated. Reference to “a male Rose Fish” is a naked statement that makes awkward its disguise of a homosexual character. In Separate Tables the disguise became so natural that it could not be bent back. The very calm, rational debate—in fact, a long discussion—about Ron by Rose and Sam as a substitute for the dramatic tension in the less verbalized earlier plays results in something like self-parody on the part of the author.
Yet the scène à faire of the play, a card game between Ron and Kurt, does restore, although with theatricality, some of the lost tension. The game subtly develops into a classical morality duel in which each fights his battle for Rose. When he wins, Ron flings the money at Rose to express his rejection of his parasitic dependence on her money. However, she prevents a fist fight between the two men by coming between them. Very deftly Rattigan builds up to this “big scene” and just as deftly deflates it of the conventional theatricality.
But the real conflict occurs within each of the two main characters, Rose and Ron. Their decisions are not made blindly, for she is aware of her impending death and he of his potentially mediocre ballet career. Their emotional inequality is dramatized with brilliance rather than in the poignantly moving manner of Separate Tables. Rattigan's laying out all his dramatic “cards on the table” did not “blow up the establishment,” but his free working in a less disguised fashion was, indeed, a variation on a theme that carries its own impact.
The obsessive need to love, even when that love is unreturned or its object unworthy, and the need to express that love, are etched with sharper and more explicit naturalistic surfaces than in the earlier dramas and make the narrative a fascinating variation on earlier characters who could not articulate their needs and frustrations. The pain and humiliation, preferable at all costs to the repressions of the Camille-like love of Rose and Ron, are the result of rational choices made by both with existentially clear awareness of the consequences.
On another level, the psychological and autobiographical subject matter is intimately Rattigan's. “Chips” Channon, an American who had married into the British upper class, enjoyed a close relationship with Rattigan similar to that of Kurt and Rose. Early liaisons with older men and later ones with younger men are variously treated in the characters of Rose, Ron, Sam, and Kurt. But if the play draws on personal experiences, the truths of those experiences have freed themselves of the factual realities in which they originate.
In addition, Rattigan wrote the play for Margaret Leighton, who had become a close friend. Even though her unhappy marriage to Laurence Harvey was in part another source for the drama, it would be difficult to draw close parallels, as the fictional truths create their own characters and situations.
The cultural milieu of the times, especially the literary scene, receives its share of attention in the play in the person of Rose's young daughter, Fiona. For her, existentialism, the angry young men, and James Deanery are old-fashioned. She has a novelist friend who writes about “a lot of young people who have love affairs with each other and don't much enjoy it, but go on doing it because there isn't any point in doing anything else.” Her attitude resembles the mood of the 1939 characters of After the Dance, the 1948 views on art in Harlequinade, and, in their fullest form, the state of the arts in their times by the characters in In Praise of Love in 1973. The views are expressed frequently as a conflict between fathers and sons or between old and new generations. There are few plays of Rattigan's in which a youthful character does not serve importantly in this capacity.
Variation on a Theme finds kinship with the type of drama Tennessee Williams wrote about rich, older American women in relationships with young men in Italy who needed above everything else to give love and/or sex by whatever means necessary. Rattigan's Rose is not so bizarre, certainly, but neither does she emerge in as sympathetic a role as his earlier heroines, and this fact may account in part for the mixed critical reception. In fact, Shelagh Delaney, incensed by Rattigan's treatment of a homosexual relationship, particularly with Margaret Leighton in the leading role, wrote A Taste of Honey to express her views of the subject in what she felt was a much more sensitive treatment.
ROSS
If Variation on a Theme enjoyed neither the critical nor popular success of Rattigan's other plays of that decade, it was more than compensated for in his next play, Ross (1960), with whose performance he began his fourth decade of writing for the stage. Not since French without Tears in 1936 and While the Sun Shines in 1942, with their respective 1,030 and 1,154 runs, had a London production of his enjoyed such success.
What made its success stand out was that in that same London season Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Arnold Wesker's Roots opened, and the English stage was luxuriating in Shakespearean productions at the Old Vic and the Aldwych. Ross more than held its own among the dramatic excitements of that year.
When it opened in New York with John Mills (in London Alec Guinness played the lead), its reception was equally strong. “Gripping Hit” (Journal American), “John Mills Triumphs” (Daily News), “Ross Magnificent Study of a Legend” (New York Mirror) read the tabloid headlines. In the New York Times Howard Taubman began his review by ranking it with Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana as “two notable plays” that “pay the theatre the compliment of regarding it as a place where the sources of man's nature may be explored with boldness and wonder. They adorn the theatre by bringing to it disciplined craftsmanship, distinction of style and integrity of purpose. With these plays the tone of the Broadway season gains greatly in quality.” In New York as well as in London Ross rivaled the best theater offerings of the season.
Recipient of such accolades, Ross was an auspicious revival of Rattigan from the blow dealt him by the New Wave critics and particularly from the mixed notices of Variation on a Theme.
Once more at the beginning of a new decade Rattigan returned to an historical theme. A dramatic portrait of the legendary T. E. Lawrence, Ross reflects Rattigan's lifelong interest in historical characters, beginning with the schoolboy play about Cesar Borgia and his reading of history at Oxford. Like the leading character in After the Dance (1939), who is a writer of history, Rattigan at times felt that he, too, should have chosen that career. His history plays are an artful wedding of two important interests.
Like Adventure Story, Ross is on its most obvious level concerned with the rise and fall of an historical hero whose actions in the drama turn on the question of identity. In the earlier play Alexander asks, “Where did I go wrong?” Now Lawrence of Arabia, who believes firmly at the outset in the Greek injunction to “Know Thyself,” asks himself, “Oh Ross—how did I become you?” The episodic narrative of both historical plays leads to a question asked by each of the two heroes.
Lawrence knows that his strength lies in the strong will by which he controls and therefore directs himself and others. He exercises his will quietly in his influence over his Arab friends and very actively in the battles in which he engages the Turks. In the climactic moment of his life, Lawrence's will is broken by Turkish captors who violate him sexually, thereby destroying the will by which he was able to repress his own homosexuality, or to sublimate it in the Arabian dream. Having such a specific focus for his portrait of Lawrence, Rattigan was able to tighten the episodic narrative with eight very brief and equally taut scenes in each of the two acts by creating a tension lacking in Variation on a Theme and lacking also in Adventure Story. The concentration is so masterful that the play seems seamless even with its episodic style.
The framework for the narration of Lawrence's Arabian adventure is his enlistment in the Royal Air Force at Uxbridge under the assumed name of Ross. He hopes his new identity will provide him with the anonymity he has chosen as his means of survival. However, a fellow serviceman discovers his secret and reveals it to the newspapers, resulting in Ross's departure from the base at the end of the play, to continue his search for anonymity in still another identity as Shaw. Between arrival at and departure from Uxbridge there is the dream-reenactment of the English-Arab conflict with the Turks, in which Lawrence played a powerful and enigmatic role. The Uxbridge framework for the Arabian episodes provided Rattigan with an effective structure from real life. Like the provincial hotel in Flare Path and the Beauregard in Separate Tables, Uxbridge allowed past events as they gathered retrospective momentum to merge subtly into Ross's move into still another attempt at anonymity.
Lawrence's mystical political faith in the Arabs' right to govern themselves is the motivation for his rise from cartographer for the British military to Arab confidante who inspired in superiors and aides alike the fierce loyalty that is the special brand of Arabs. He worked with a quietness and unassuming force which his British and Turkish superiors or equals tended to see as arrogance but which the common run of military personnel and “the uncommon” superiors such as General Allenby and Auda Abu Tayi sensed to be a profound clarity, wisdom, and honesty.
The three parallel scenes, in which Lawrence earns the respect of Auda, Allenby and, with disastrously negative consequences, the Turkish general, illustrate Rattigan's mastery of scene construction, in which leanness and implicitness of dialogue are at their best.
In the first of the three, the theatrical irony is brilliant. After discussing the military realities of the Arabs, a Turkish captain arrives to negotiate with Auda, in the presence of Lawrence, the capture of this fanatic Englishman. His offer is a set of false teeth for Auda, just as in the opening scenes there is a price to be extracted by Dickinson from either the newspaper or Lawrence himself for the revelation or concealment of Ross's identity. Auda carries his joke so far as to ask Lawrence, dressed as an Arab, to escort the captain out of the tent. Both men laugh about the joke they have just played on the Turk, even as Auda looks longingly at the fragments his rifle has just made of the false teeth.
In a second equally forceful scene with General Allenby, Lawrence's ability to inspire respect is further dramatized. Allenby's fear of the intellectual superiority of Lawrence is quickly dismissed when the latter incorrectly identifies the date of an alabaster perfume jar which he had presented to the general. Lawrence smilingly receives Allenby's correction, and the tension breaks. The two find they have reading interests in common; in addition Lawrence had made it a point to learn of Allenby's interests in “Shakespeare, Chippendale, mobile warfare, Chopin and children.” The tension of a first meeting relieved, both men proceed to discuss military strategy and, even more importantly, matters of self-knowledge, belief, and the ability to will one's self into a belief. The last point, in the form of a question to Lawrence, is significant as it is Lawrence's will that the Turks later break by their homosexual rape of him. With the breaking of that will came the loss of belief in his dream and the subsequent searches for peace under assumed identities of Ross and Shaw.
The third parallel occurs two scenes later. The audience is prepared for it by a short conversation between the Turkish general and captain in which the former discussed Lawrence as a man with two faiths: one in the Arabs' readiness for statehood, and the other, “more vulnerable—what I hear he calls his bodily integrity.” Like Allenby they have done their homework well. But unable to get Lawrence to recant his first faith, they proceed by rape to destroy the second. After the sexual violation, the general explains to Lawrence the reason:
I do pity you, you know. You won't ever believe it, but it's true. I know what was revealed to you tonight, and I know what that revelation will have done to you. You can think I mean just a broken will, if you like. That might have destroyed you by itself. But I mean more than that. Far more. (Angrily.) But why did you leave yourself so vulnerable? What's the use of learning if it doesn't teach you to know yourself as you really are? … For you, killing wasn't enough.
The Turkish general's intelligence of Lawrence had gone beyond that of Auda and Allenby, and the Turk's violence on Lawrence ironically carried out the early conversations between Allenby and Lawrence on the matter of will. Even to Allenby and Auda, Lawrence's unwillingness to be touched and his talent for self-concealment were known, so that his rape by the Turks is subtly and credibly prepared for. Lawrence's flaw is self-concealment, and the Greek hubris (a word used in the play) is very much the theme of Rattigan's psychological portrait of Lawrence.
Lawrence's assumed identities were the means by which he sought the peace he talks about to his Uxbridge acquaintances. In the final scene of the play, the sympathetic efforts of his comrades to keep him in their company is a first step in that direction. When Parsons indignantly comments on the way Ross is being treated as the “most dirtiest, bleedingest trick that even those bastards have ever pulled on one of us,” Lawrence quietly questions, “On one of us?” His earlier belief in himself and in the Arabian dream destroyed, he welcomes the simply human sympathy of the sergeant, who expresses the men's intentions to help Ross, because there's no one “in this world who can't be made to fit in somehow—” Both separateness and community are necessary for his survival. In the tradition of Rattigan's endings, Ross “looks round the hut for the last time and then shouldering his kitbag, he follows the Flight Sergeant out.” Again there is the Chekhovian continuity of life. Ross's search for peace will continue under still another identity. The peace he searches for is community on an anonymous basis that would allow him a measure of separateness within that community.
Those early attempts of Rattigan in French without Tears to construct scenes in a Chekhovian manner have matured into the lean tautness of the episodes in Ross in which implicit truths about the characters are effectively drawn.
Most reviews of the play referred to the fact that Rattigan had completed a film script for Lawrence of Arabia, whose shooting was postponed and eventually canceled. Later a screen version by Robert Bolt was filmed, but Michael Darlow regards Rattigan's script as being superior to Bolt's. In any event, the screenplay was partly responsible for the dramatic polish to Ross which his other history plays may have lacked.
Like the plays it preceded and followed, Ross is a play about a homosexual subject, handled without the need for disguises or apology or even the need to shock the establishment. The specific sexual problem could just as easily have been of another sort, and its truths would have remained intact. Dealt with as an intensely human condition, without affectation, stereotypes, or propagandistic intent to increase public tolerance, the subject matter takes on natural rhythms of historical event and private experience. In Ross implicitness, focus, and seamless flow of dramatic narrative are at their best.
Finally, Ross is Rattigan's last successful stageplay before, under the impact of personal events and professional disappointment, he turned from the stage to films. The very question which Lawrence asks himself at the end of Act I, “Oh Ross—how did I become you?”, is the question that Rattigan frequently asked himself from 1960 until 1970, when once more he returned to the London stage with A Bequest to the Nation.
MAN AND BOY
In the immediate post-1956 period, Rattigan wrote a third but less successful play, Man and Boy, in which homosexuality was openly handled, although not of primary interest in the narrative. This time one of the major confidence men of the twentieth century, Ivar Kreuger, is fictionalized in his relationship to a son who had disowned him and is now living in a small Greenwich Village, New York, apartment.
The thickly plotted play involves Gregor Antonescu, who uses his illegitimate son's apartment in the Village to extricate himself from the most catastrophic financial situation of his career. Having been involved in the shady financial schemes of his father, the disillusioned son had broken with him five years earlier and has seen nothing of him since. A struggling pianist, he lives in a cheap Greenwich Village apartment with an actress, Carol Penn. He knows nothing of his father's present scheme until suddenly Gregor shows up, revealing nothing of his real purpose but asking the use of the apartment. A parasitic aide, Sven, has now replaced Basil in his father's manipulations.
The current confidence game entails the softening of a public announcement of the failure of an Antonescu merger with the holdings of American Electric, whose executive head, Herries, is a homosexual. The weapons Gregor employs to achieve the softening are his knowledge of Herries's homosexual affair with Harter and the use of Basil Antonescu as homosexual bait for Herries. Both prove abortive when the newspaper headlines scream the news that the FBI, having been informed of forged collaterals in a recent Bank of London scandal, is looking for Antonescu. Basil, who had furiously left the apartment upon realizing what his father was up to, returns with the newspapers to inform Gregor and Sven. One by one wife and colleagues desert Gregor, who even helps Sven plan his own suicide. Only Basil refuses to leave him. As it began, the play ends with the radio blaring the latest news about the swindler.
On one level the play deals with the struggle within Antonescu to live without a conscience. Up to this time he has managed so successfully he did not need the love that boy could offer man. Now it is all he has left, and with the vanishing of his world, he acknowledges that the roles of man and boy are reversing. “Who is now the strong and who the weak?” Beyond disillusion himself, Gregor attempts to disillusion Basil by branding as sentimental lies the stories about his (Gregor's) boyhood. His attempt to discard the very idea of a conscience is rejected by Basil, and at one moving point they embrace in a scene reminiscent of the Willy Loman-Biff relationship in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It is the only emotion that Gregor has allowed himself in a long time, very much like the emotional release of Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version. It is indeed a refutation of Gregor's own contention that he has no conscience and an affirmation of the Rattiganesque need for belonging to humanity. Yet even this brief emotional moment cancels itself out in Gregor's last words to his son: “Whatever happens never, in the future, let the truth make you cry.” Basil's response is “I won't—not any more.” The strong hatred which the son had felt for the father has surfaced as love. The utter unscrupulousness and amorality have for a brief moment been transformed into feeling and, therefore, into humanity.
The ironic ambivalence is underscored in the final words of the play in the form of a radio announcement that the president of American Electric, Mr. Mark Herries, would make a guest appearance to discuss the widely hunted swindler. Herries's comment “that to be absolutely powerful a man must first corrupt himself absolutely” reflects Rattigan's skepticism about the possibility of any kind of redemption for the tycoon. In an interview Rattigan had said that Ross is about a man who wanted to be God and Man and Boy is about a man who wanted to be the devil.
Personal parallels obtrude on this modern morality play. Basil Anthony (like Ross of the previous drama, he has an assumed identity) is twenty-three years old and was born in 1911, the year of Rattigan's birth. At twenty-three Rattigan had made a break with his own father regarding a career choice. The time of the events in Man and Boy is 1934, two years before Rattigan's huge success with French without Tears. Nearly thirty years later, Rattigan dramatizes the old myth of selling one's soul to the devil, feeling keenly in his own financial successes at the time the aspiring, idealistic boy he once was and the successful man he now is. As his last play before giving up the stage for the film world for the next seven years, Man and Boy seems an ironically fitting expression of his own state at the time. Further, Antonescu is from Rumania, where Frank Rattigan had spent some years as diplomat and which is drawn upon for characters in The Sleeping Prince. The mistresses of Antonescu, whom the American tycoon Herries described as the “most highly publicized mistresses of any man in the world—also a beautiful young wife” suggest the women in Frank Rattigan's much-publicized affairs, already dramatized in Who Is Sylvia? Basil's financial problems as a struggling pianist were Rattigan's when he worked for Warner Brothers studio. The homosexual Herries and his young male friend who committed suicide are drawn from Rattigan's early experience. Autobiographical details are woven deftly into this play, which Michael Darlow sees as a parallel to Rattigan's possible reassessment of his own relationship to his father.
Man and Boy is Rattigan's most pessimistic play. Like Shaw's Heartbreak House, Ibsen's Wild Duck, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, there is a void at the center of things left by the cancellation of idealism by realism, youth by age, optimism by pessimism. In no other play of Rattigan's is the void so pronounced as in Man and Boy.
In varying ways, all of Rattigan's plays deal with internal and external conflicts of conscience, whether in the small man taking on the highest court in the land or in legendary heroes such as T. E. Lawrence and Sir Horatio Nelson in conflict with themselves. The succession of leading characters in Rattigan's work presents a varied pattern of the forms that battles of conscience take. The battle ends with some measure of victory, even though minuscule in a few instances. The victory for right in the case of Ronnie Winslow affected an entire nation. In Hester Collyer, Crocker-Harris, and Major Pollock, some measure of private dignity has been achieved, and in Rose Fish the mere presence of conscience in her final, fatal choice of Ron over the Kurt Masts of her life is a victory, however slim, of the needs of the individual over prevailing social pressures. However, Gregor Antonescu's success in disillusioning Basil about the last “lie” on which the financial empire had been built seems a prelude to his rejecting the son's love after an intense but brief expression of that love. The lies and rejections are major components in relationships between Rose and her daughter Fiona, between Crocker-Harris and his wife, between Major Pollock and the outside world, but nowhere is their consequence so total as in Man and Boy. Even though the father has sold his soul to the devil, the son can love him. Yet there is his troubling promise to Antonescu never to let the truth make him (Basil) cry.
The possibility of redemption for the man seems minuscule indeed, as Gregor's truth is that of a man who has rejected conscience and knowingly continues to reject it. Basil's ability to love even a father who has tried to become the devil is the ultimate attempt to keep Gregor's connection with humanity. Love is offered and rejected. The moral and emotional wasteland of Gregor seems unrelieved. Yet in this moral desert Rattigan's narrative power, Bernard Levin wrote, fuses with his dramatic cunning and his “imaginative curiosity about the springs of human activity—hot and glowing into his finest work and a play that outdistances all but a handful of authors writing in England today.”
Negative reactions to the play were strong, however. Because of the homosexual matter and the absence of psychological explanation for Gregor's actions, some criticism was quite harsh. Yet, one can argue, psychological explanations are not the terms of Rattigan's dramatic style. To expect the patterned motivations of Ibsenian or Strindbergian characters is to ignore those terms, which are the revelation of character through narrative means.
As Rattigan's wasteland play, Man and Boy lacks the questioning whose end is the self-knowledge of the previous plays. The question asked by a radio interviewer is put to Herries, himself of questionable moral cast. “Why did a man who, by 1929, had achieved every ambition that any great financier could hope for, a man who was already acclaimed. … Why did this man descend to … common swindling … and to total ruin—both for himself and for millions of those who trusted him?” The answer is clearly dramatized throughout the play by Gregor's actions and can be found in his two favorite words: liquidity and confidence.
The big confidence game, success, creates hero-worship, Gregor contends, “but to be loved and worshipped by one's own boy—and by this boy above all. … Oh, no. No. I will take almost any risk—you know that, Sven—but not the risk of being so close to the pure in heart. ‘And virtue entered into him’—isn't that from the Bible?” Underneath the hatred, man and boy find that there is still love. But Gregor takes a step to the point of no moral return to disillusion the boy, and he does succeed. Neither man nor boy has any more questions, and it is left to the American tycoon Herries to provide the expected, hypocritical answer to the question of the radio announcer.
John Russell Taylor regards Man and Boy, along with Coward's A Song at Twilight, “as the first completely convincing, completely serious well-made play in the British theatre for more than half a century. …” Taylor's assessment that the play is a distinct advance on The Deep Blue Sea, however, many would dispute. He continues that Man and Boy
for all its neatness as a piece of plotting … has the fascination of a tale that is told, not precisely explicable, seeming to imply much more than it says. For unlike The Deep Blue Sea it does not actually say anything: or what it has to say escapes all neat, pat formulation. It is the character-portrait of a man without qualities, and Rattigan seems in it for the first time to be moving outside the neat, clear-cut world of the well-made play, where there is always an explanation hidden somewhere in a secret drawer, and into the shifting, indeterminate world of contemporary drama, which might take as its motto Gertrude Stein's supposed last words “What is the answer … ? Very well then what is the question?” But still preserving the form of the well-made play: a curious and potentially explosive combination.
With its intentionally limited run and despite some harsh reviews, Man and Boy intrigues and fascinates with its conventional plotting of surface action, its articulate dialogue and its near Beckettian sense of the void at the center of things riding close to the surface features of the play. A modern-day Faust, it is the third of Rattigan's stage dramas after 1956 and the last stage production before his self-exile to the film world.
All three plays written after the Osborne explosion at the Royal Court Theatre deal openly with homosexual subject matter. All three deal with characters confronting the harsh realities of sex, confidence games, and political and financial power. The inevitable consequences are relentlessly natural, particularly in Ross and Man and Boy, in which man aspires to be God in one and the devil in the other. As modern morality plays, the comment on the arts, politics, and finances is intertwined with painfully intimate experiences. A godlike Ross, a satanic Antonescu, and a totally human Rose Fish (embodying both the romantic and disillusioned in her very name) are indeed both representative types and distinctive individuals whose failures have only affirmed their respective strengths. The fragility and disguises of the characters in earlier plays now give way to power and honesty. The effects are noticeable in the very construction of the scenes in which tension-building debates and ironical situations deepen characterizations of people in whom separateness, community, and conscience still battle with each other in a fascinating blend of human activity. This trilogy of post-1956 plays, impressive each in its own way, is Rattigan's response to the challenge of the new waves of drama. In that response he has developed a direction that took him into seven years of writing for films and then into seven more years of stage activity in which he wrote three final plays.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.