TERENCE RATTIGAN

A gossipy yet earnest portrait of the once-popular British dramatist, unlikely to attract many American readers. Rattigan (191177) had his first West End success (French Without Tears) when he was only 25, and he would never quite shake his reputation as a smooth, shallow crowd-pleaser, even though London critics grudgingly admitted that The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954) were expert character studies that bleakly demonstrated the essential irrationality of love. (American critics were seldom even that welcoming, and few of his plays did well on Broadway.) At the height of his commercial success and artistic powers, in 1956, Rattigan was vilified—with only partial accuracy—as representative of a complacent, middle-class Britain that angry young men like John Osborne and Arnold Wesker were determined to destroy. He had a few more hits and a lucrative screenwriting career, but his self-confidence never recovered from the body blow dealt by the new theatre of the 1950s and its acolytes, most notably critic Kenneth Tynan. Wansell (Tycoon, 1987, etc.) had access to Rattigan's private papers and many of his friends; he has done a passable job of laying out the basic chronology, and his desire to do justice to a thoughtful, honest writer unjustly maligned as trivial strikes a chord. But his emphasis on the playwright's homosexuality seems excessive, an inadequate substitute for a three-dimensional presentation of Rattigan's personality, which remains shadowy. The heavy-handed insistence on a gay subtext in almost every Rattigan play is matched by Wansell's lugubrious and pedestrian explication of other themes, such as the playwright's fraught relationship with his parents. Not bad, but not good enough to gain renewed attention for a pleasing second-rank playwright. (8 pages illustrations, not seen)