Playwrights From England

"Who dares this pair of boots displace, Must meet Bombastes face to face."

"You know you haven't got a singing face."

"If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself."

"I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell."

"The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory."

"One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog.""

"Always ding dinging Dame Grundy into my ears - What will Mrs. Grundy say? What will Mrs. Grundy think?"

"Handy, jun. Zounds, the room's in a blaze! Sir Abel. Don't say so, Bob. Handy, jun. What's to be done? Where's your famous preparation for extinguishing flames? Sir Abel. It is not mixed. Handy, jun. Where's your fire escape? Sir Abel. It is not fixed. Handy, jun. Where's your patent fire engine? Sir Abel. 'Tis on the road. Handy, jun. Well, you are never at a loss. Sir Abel. Never. Handy, jun. What's to be done? Sir Abel. I don't know."

"I eat well, and I drink well, and I sleep well—but that's all."

"Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed."

"Push on,—keep moving."

"Oh would I were a boy again, When life seemed formed of sunny years, And all the heart then knew of pain Was wept away in transient tears! When every tale Hope whispered then, My fancy deemed was only truth. Oh, would that I could know again, The happy visions of my youth."

"Forth we went, a gallant band— Youth, Love, Gold and Pleasure."

"Break free, my soul, good manners are thy tomb!"

"Shells with lip, or tooth, or bleeding gum, Tell-tale shells, and shells that whisper 'Come', Shells that stammer, blush, and yet are dumb – " "O let me hear!"

"In my opinion Mr. Moore is a greater poet than Mr. Yeats. He has lived obscurely, and has not displayed Mr. Yeats's talent for self-dramatization; for these reasons and others he has never become a public figure or a popular writer."

"For milkmaids and queens and gipsy-princesses Dream and kiss blindfold or starve upon guesses."

"Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear (The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves) With sensitive heads alert of ear; Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves."

"A sheep in sheep's clothing."

"From humble Port to imperial Tokay."

"Kitty: Shikspur? Shikspur? Who wrote it? No, I never read Shikspur. Lady Bab: Then you have an immense pleasure to come."

"The fact that he never felt able to write directly about his own homosexuality, taken by some to be a mark of dishonesty or cowardice, actually adds an extra level of hurt to his work."

"Their great success is in articulating the anxieties of difference, of the will to fit in, to be ordinary; and of a corresponding desire to be extraordinary, to be different, to be individual. It is this tension that has enabled these works to transcend the trappings of their period, which had been much of their original attraction for my grandmother in the 1940s and 1950s, and to resonate emotionally for me today."

"He must rank with Sir Noël Coward as one of the leaders of the twentieth-century stage in what has come to be known as the Theatre of Entertainment. It can be a misleading label; frequently Rattigan worked in depth. But it is true that, without venturing into what he regarded as unprofitable minority experiment, he wrote some of the most enduring narrative plays of his period, designed for a "commercial" theatre and using traditional techniques Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones would have recognized."

"The critics do talk a lot of rubbish about craftsmanship because it's something they don't understand at all... The fact is that Terence Rattigan's craftsmanship is like a carriage clock. They can see the insides and the workings of it, so it makes them feel more comfortable. They think: "Oh, yes, I see, that's what he's going to do next — very good!" — And so he gets ten out of ten all the time, quite rightly."

"It's the most amazing story and there is something extraordinarily real about the play. Why is the insight into the fear and terror so authentic? Because Rattigan lived it. The language of stiff upper lip and the understatement of wartime bravery is utterly authentic because it was what he knew and heard all around him in 1941."

"A critic has a duty to ignore anything happening off stage, and to make no allowances for any shortcomings that may result... All the same, I am at any rate partly human, and it would be absurd, as well as impossible, for me to persuade myself that I do not know that Terence Rattigan has for the last couple of years been staring into the eyes of the old gentleman with the scythe... So I am doubly delighted to say that Cause Célèbre (Her Majesty's) betrays no sign of failing powers; on the contrary it could almost herald a new direction for Sir Terence, and a most interesting one, too."

"I detect in his plays a deep personal, surely sexual, pain, which he manages at the same time to express and disguise. The craftsmanship of which we hear so much loose talk seems to me to arise from deep psychological necessity, a drive to organise the energy that arises out of his own pain... I think Rattigan is not at all the commercial middlebrow dramatist his image suggests but someone peculiarly haunting and oblique who certainly speaks to me with resonance of existential bleakness and irresoluble carnal solitude."

"From French Without Tears (1936) to his last work for the stage, Rattigan was unashamedly a West End writer, an absorbed craftsman with a wit that reflected his own friendly, generous nature. It was a pity, no doubt, that he invented, as a symbolic playgoer, the well-to-do, middle-class "Aunt Edna" whose tastes, he said, deserved as much attention as those of the avant-garde. Her name slipped into a catchphrase. Rattigan's opponents, at an hour of theatrical rebellion, took every chance to belittle a probing storyteller."

"[Terence Rattigan] had the greatest natural talent for the stage of any man this century."

"French execrable: theatre-sense first class."

"They are characterized by a refinement of mind and style that time is already beginning to prove are more than English public-school virtues and sleek techniques, as his strongest attackers claimed. Kenneth Tynan's labeling of him as the Formosa of the British theater and then Rattigan's subsequent creation of Aunt Edna, as well as his self-instituted debate in a "battle of the theatres," hounded him throughout most of his career. Yet, in what Hilary Spurling described as that "tricky but crucial (and so far almost wholly neglected) stretch of contemporary theatrical history when the stage became society's distorting mirror," Rattigan occupies a prominent place as the "oblique and delicate playwright of inarticulacy, repression, self-punishment, above all the damage people do to themselves.""

"Each of his dramas is a progressive refinement of that sense of theater of which he spoke so frequently, a sense which insisted on the duality of the playwright as both writer and audience. The loss of touch with the audience which characterized the dramatic experimentation in the revolutionary stage events since 1956 was caused to a certain degree by the elitism of many of the changes. Rattigan never lost touch. To move an audience to laughter and to tears, rather than to confusion or puzzlement, was always his primary goal, and he consistently maintained sight of that goal. Of his contemporary dramatists, he alone survived the upheavals of the 1950s with his traditional approach which renewed itself in his stage comeback of 1970. And before the experimental waves subsided into the mainstream of theater history, Rattigan once more became a part of that stream. His comedies, history plays, and moving dramas about flawed or failed characters course their way unerringly down the moral and emotional mainstream of their troubled times."

"It was often assumed that Rattigan was simply a purveyor of good middlebrow entertainment... Yet his whole world is a sustained assault on English middle-class values: fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex. In fact, few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan."

"When you're between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting."

"He was a great playwright who understood better than most the inequality of passion and the fear of emotional expression that haunts our national psyche."

"Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she "does know what she likes". Let us call her Aunt Edna."

"Kenneth: If you’re so hot, you'd better tell me how to say she has ideas above her station. Brian: Oh, yes, I forgot. It's fairly easy, old boy. Elle a des idées au-dessus de sa gare."

"That's the main trouble with the two nations: bad Brits are snobs, bad Americans are slobs."

"It's a masterpiece of understatement but then we're rather good at understatement, aren't we?"

"A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute."

"The men climb the Andes."

"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process."

"Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right..."

"Do you know what le vice Anglais – the English vice – really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty – whatever the French believe it to be. It's our refusal to admit to our emotions. We think they demean us, I suppose."

"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting."

"He appeared to be a complete model of the conforming upper-class Englishman just as his works appear to be perfect specimens of the well-made play, in reality he was not in the least conforming...there was a deeply Proustian ambivalence at the heart of him."

"His best works will long be studied as models of playwriting and also as mirrors of the times. Rattigan can capture the social outlook of a whole period in Cause Célèbre (or the cause célèbre of The Winslow Boy). He can plumb the depths of obsessions rampant in a sedate residential hotel near Bournemouth, a crummy North London flat, a Public School, the active lives of Alexander the Great or T. E. Lawrence or Lord Nelson, the twisted lives of a financier with a charming but weak son or a rapacious woman out to snare her fifth and richest man who falls prey (willingly, self-destructively) to an ambiguous little ballet dancer. Variations on a Theme (whose plot is the last of those situations mentioned) is closely based on Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias – but it is based on a steady and shrewd observation of English life in Rattigan's own time."