"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."