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I hear on the grapevine that plans to name a London West End theatre after Terence Rattigan have temporarily stalled. An even better way to honour Rattigan is to revive his plays and the latest such revival is the rarely seen Man and Boy, which opens at the National’s Dorfman theatre at the end of this month. The play had brief runs on Broadway and in London in 1963 with Charles Boyer in the lead and another outing in 2005 with David Suchet giving a mesmerising performance as “the man” of the title, a beleaguered Romanian financier, but to all intents and purposes this is an unknown Rattigan.
I would suggest that it reveals a surprising amount about its author. The first thing to hit one is how much the play’s success or failure mattered to Rattigan himself. It was sparked by a book about the swindling Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger, whose business empire collapsed at the height of the Great Depression. Setting the action in 1934, Rattigan shows his hero, Gregor Antonescu, hiding out in his estranged son’s Greenwich Village apartment to which he lures the chair of American Electric in the hope of securing a life-saving merger. What is shocking is the ruthlessness with which Gregor exploits his son’s sexual charms.
Equally astonishing is the normally diplomatic Rattigan’s belief that the play should be performed on his own terms or not at all. To him Gregor is “as evil as Iago” and when the play’s intended star, Rex Harrison, and director, Glen Byam Shaw, sought to soften the text and Laurence Olivier rejected the play for his opening Chichester season, Rattigan dug his heels in. The play mattered hugely to Rattigan because, with his theatrical reputation at its lowest ebbb thanks to the rise of a new Royal Court generation, he felt it was his last chance to prove he was a serious dramatist.
But there are more personal reasons behind Rattigan’s emotional investment. At heart, the play is a father-and-son drama and you only have to read the excellent biographies by Michael Darlow and Geoffrey Wansell to realise how crucial to Rattigan’s life and work was his own filial relationship. His father, Frank, was a career diplomat forced to resign after an affair with a Romanian princess: in many ways his father’s antithesis, Rattigan inherited his talent for pretence and belief in masked emotion.
But he also used his work to explore the complexities of their relationship. He said of Adventure Story, his play about Alexander the Great, that the hero’s “physical energy, strategic brilliance and determination were inspired by love of his father”. Conversely in Who Is Sylvia? – written a year later, in 1950 – the sexually voracious hero who stays resolutely married is a thinly disguised portrait of philandering Frank. By the time we get to Man and Boy, Rattigan bases the whole work on a tangled father-son relationship full of social and political antagonism and interdependence.
Yet another thread running through the play is that of homosexuality and it is fascinating how often Rattigan, the most discreet of men in relation to sexual disclosure, returns to the theme. David Hare once persuaded me that Crocker-Harris, the schoolmaster hero of Rattigan’s The Browning Version, is a shrewdly manipulative figure who always ends up with his wife’s lovers. Rattigan’s Alexander the Great enjoys an implicitly gay relationship with his confidant, Hephaestion. In Table Number Seven, the second half of Separate Tables, the residents of a private hotel rally to the defence of a bogus major accused of sexual importuning. Initially couched in hetero terms, the major’s lapse is clearly a metaphor for cottaging and it is greatly to Rattigan’s credit that in 1954, three years before the Wolfenden report advocated that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”, he saw a shift in public attitudes.
But while Man and Boy was clearly of huge importance to Rattigan, does it matter to us? Audiences will judge for themselves, but it is hard not to see in it intimations of more recent scandals. One inevitably thinks of Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born media mogul who misappropriated the Mirror’s pension fund and who died in mysterious circumstances. His daughter, Ghislaine, was the accomplice of the American financier Jeffrey Epstein, convicted of child sexual abuse offences.
The sins of Rattigan’s Gregor are less rank but, while he is heartless, exploitative and dishonest, he has a dynamism and drive that make him – not unlike Lambert Le Roux in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda – theatrically compelling. Rattigan has grasped the central paradox of drama: that we are fascinated by monsters as long as they embody William Blake’s maxim that “energy is eternal delight”.
