Terence Rattigan was one of England’s most beloved playwrights during the early to mid-twentieth century. He was born in London and was educated at Harrow, later graduating from Oxford University. He developed a love of theatre from a young age and the idea for his first play, First Episode (1933) was conceived out of an unrequited love for his best friend while at university. The play was produced at the Q Theatre in Surrey before transferring to the West End. His next play, French Without Tears (1936), became an unexpected, long-running West End success and it established Rattigan’s reputation as a popular playwright.
Rattigan’s next play After the Dance (1939) closed early in the West End due to the outbreak of World War Two. Despite serving as an RAF gunner, Rattigan continued to write and produce plays during the war years. These included Follow My Leader (1940), Flare Path (1942; based on Rattigan’s own wartime experiences), While The Sun Shines (1943), and Love In Idleness (1944).
Post-war, Rattigan wrote three of his most famous, and arguably best, plays.The Winslow Boy (1946) was based on a real-life case of a public schoolboy wrongfully accused of theft. He followed this with The Browning Version (1948), which was produced as part of a double bill and centered around the futile life of a repressed Classics teacher. Finally, The Deep Blue Sea (1952) was inspired by the suicide of Rattigan’s former lover, Kenneth Morgan, but portrayed the complex position of a married woman who is wildly in love with a man who cannot return her feelings.
His later plays included Separate Tables (1954) and In Praise of Love (1973), but Rattigan turned increasingly to writing screenplays which paid well and funded his life in Bermuda. By the 1960s, Rattigan’s work began to be deemed old-fashioned when compared to the angry kitchen-sink dramas being produced by up and coming British playwrights such as John Osborne.
Many of his plays deal with issues around repression and the notion of being an outsider. Many critics argue that this was due to being private homosexual, at a time when it was still illegal. Rattigan was knighted in 1971 for his services to theatre. He died six years later at his home in Bermuda.
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