Terence Rattigan: A Biography by Geoffrey Wansell (review)

560 Book Reviews domestic and global economic relationships through the figure of the double in Cliarlotte Lum's These Unsaid Things, Hwang's FOB, and Elizabeth Wong's Letters to a Student Revolutionary. The final chapter, "Staging 'Passing ' on the Borders of the Body," considers the problematics of representing race on stage, and looks at a group of plays which specifically focus on the fraught relationship between embodiment and cultural construction as they intersect in Asian American identity: VeHna Hasu Houston's Tea, Ping Chong's Kind Ness, and Jeannie Barroga's Walls. Lee ends by gesturing toward future studies of Asian American theatre and performance and the areas yet to be explored - a gesture which is at once ·generous and modest, for Pelforming Asian America itself represents a significant and broadly relevant contribution to the field. KAREN SHIMAKAWA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS GEOFFREY WANSELL. Terence Rattigan: A Biography. New York: SI. Martin's Press 1997. Pp. 434, illustrated. $29·95 The standard biography of Terence Rattigan, by Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson - begun in consultation with the playwright and published (1979) within a year of his death - identified the "pain of love and sex. " as the plays' controlling motif. That"book saw Rattigan's need to conceal his private life as "an indictment of [society's] prejudice and repression" and, in uncovering the facts, argued for a tolerance, between "extremes ... of dogmatism and of permissiveness /' which might re-value the plays on their own tenns. Geoffrey Wansell's new biography develops that motif but presents a more extreme version of Rattigan-as-victim. ]n the intervening years, more of the dramatist's papers have become available , friends and foes have written memoirs, survivors have been intetviewed. Accordingly, Wansell uncovers more facts, sets others to rights, and depicts a man who, from the heights of commercial success, was thrust down by the "jealousy" of anti-establishment, homophobic bigots. His book ends dramatically with Rattigan's Munchlike agony: "His scream was no less powerful, or less poignant, for being almost strangled." From that viewpoint, Rattigan's upper-class persona offercd an easy target to the "angry" outsiders of the mid-1950s while his homosexuality (however well disguised) compounded their antagonism. The villains, here, are George Devine of The English Stage Company, "the flamboyantly heterosexual" Kenneth Tynan of The Observer, and, more controversially, from within the citadel , a jealous Noel Coward. Their prejudiced antipathy would "break his spirit, I believe, and shorten his life." Whereas the standard version acknowledged the playwright's re-instatement in the last years of his life (signalled by Book Reviews a knighthood in 1971 and a revival of French Withour Tears at the Young Vic [1973] which youthful audiences recognized as "more than a mere frolic"), Wansell selects the most damning critiques in order to present a despised and broken man. Probably the truth lies somewhere in between, but, since Wansell gives no foolnotes in a book designed for the general reader, that bias is difficult to assess. Nevertheless, his biography constructs an important analysis of Rattigan's attitude to his father, an Edwardian "Major" who lived on his past as a consular diplomat and his present with a succession of impressionable blonde "nieces": that theme lies close to Wansell's own history. Rattigan's adored. mother is almost as important, since her values epitomized the "Aunt Edna" he so wished to please and mollify. Those relationships illumine the plays in thought-provoking flashes as glimpses of social and familial suppression: "- the English vice ... It's our refusal to admit our emotions." Underneath that, and less intentionally, runs a classic hubris. Terry the schoolboy cricket-hero, the Oxford aesthete and deviant, the West End's golden-boy who gambled away a fortune, coasted through the war in careless luxury, took casual lovers while bemoaning his partners' betrayals until, at the sudden reversal of theatrical fashion, he collapsed in despair, having no inner resources to combat the slings and arrows of outrageously vicious critics. Seen that way, Rattigan becomes the victim of his own empty self, and the reticence of his plays appears to mask an essential lack of moral and intellectual toughness. Wansell skates over those suspicions...