Look Back In Honesty - Bill Bray assesses the subterfuge of Terence Rattigan

Those who remember British theatre in the 1950s will recall that the West End was dominated by the management of H M Tennent with 'Binkie' Beaumont as boss. Until 1968 we were subject to the approval of scripts by the Lord Chamberlain, and homosexuality was a criminal offence until 1967. Bizarre, perhaps, that one of the favourite writers of that period was Terence Rattigan, who, perforce, was obliged to conceal the true nature of his plots and his own sexual preference, because he would have alienated some of his large following among theatre-goers. It was a period when what is now called homophobia was comfortably accepted as the norm.

Separate Tables opened in London in September 1954 and was a considerable success. Rattigan had discovered the world of wealthy loneliness when visiting his mother who was living in an hotel in South Kensington and he knew instinctively how much the inhabitants of a private hotel craved companionship. He was writing not one play but two one-acts, set in the same location with largely the same characters except for the two leading protagonists in each play. It became an acting tour de force for these four diverse characters to be played by two leading actors.

Rattigan was feeling discontented with 'Binkie' Beaumont over a disagreement about his recent smash-hit, for Coronation Year, 1953: The Sleeping Prince, and so he offered the new play to another management and also showed it to the Oliviers, Laurence and Vivien, who had scored such a success in The Sleeping Prince. Olivier was so keen on the new play for Vivien and himself that he asked Rattigan to postpone the production for eighteen months so that it would fit in with their busy schedule. The play could not wait and finally Eric Portman and Margaret Leighton were cast and the play opened to good, and some ecstatic, reviews. Harold Hobson called the second of the pair of plays, "One of Rattigan's masterpieces, in which he shows in superlative degree his pathos, his humour and his astounding mastery over the English language..."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kenneth Tynan, who deplored the Binkie/Rattigan mafia and its stranglehold on British theatre, was faint in praise and seems to have detected the truth: "For my part I regretted that the major's crime as not something more cathartic....yet I suppose the play is as good a handling of sexual abnormality as English playgoers will tolerate." Rattigan did not accept this criticism and later insisted that , "the audience fully realised that the Major's indiscretions were in fact symbolical of another problem which, after several prominent prosecutions, they were most sensitively conscious. The audience knew my problem and that I had to skirt around it."

It was, however, during the run of the play, in May 1956, that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had its explosive impact at the Royal Court, presented by the English Stage Company. The ESC was headed by George Devine, who loathed the Binkie scene, and was strongly supported by Tynan, the leading drama critic of the time in The Observer. Rattigan, with arrogant myopia, was rather contemptuous of Osborne and also of another cataclysmic influence, Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot. Rattigan became unfashionable and only achieved the sort of success on stage that had attended his earlier plays with Ross, about T.E.Lawrence, with Alec Guiness, and with Cause Célèbre about an infamous murder trial of 1935, which had been originally written for radio. In his later plays he did not fudge the issue of homosexuality now that it was no longer a criminal offence and his career no longer needed to be protected.

We can now assess his work and agree with Harold Pinter on his quality. Pinter, who acted under the name of David Baron, was in rep. at Torquay and played the Major and John Franklin in Separate Tables in the 1957 season. The two men became great friends and later, Pinter recalled, "He wasn't at all pretentious. He had real charm and was suffering from the way he had been treated. It was fashion and spite that saw him booted about...driven by envy. He had a great respect for the craft of writing. He was very skilful, very entertaining and very shrewd about human nature. He wasn't a safe playwright at all but very adventurous." We now have a chance to reassess Rattigan and Separate Tables.

Director John Wilson introduces the play...

From the early forties to the mid-fifties, Terence Rattigan was a major force on the British stage. At one time three of his plays were running simultaneously, in adjacent West End theatres. Yet for the last two decades of his life, he seemed to go out of fashion. His best work includes The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and my personal favourite, Separate Tables, in which his main themes are secret grief, feelings of inadequacy and fear of exposure.

The setting is the Beauregard Private Hotel, Bournemouth, which Rattigan based on the Stanhope Court Hotel in Kensington, where his mother lived after the death of his father. Some of the characters in Separate Tables are based on people the author observed whilst visiting his mother. The character of Anne Shankland was inspired by a top fashion model, Jean Dawnay, and the problems of Major Pollock reflect a scandal which had touched, but not damaged, the life of John Gielgud.

Although Separate Tables is about loneliness and how it can be endured, do not think of this as a bleak play; on the contrary, it is full of warmth and humour and it is performed here by a cast of the highest calibre.