Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme

Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme RICHARD FOULKES IN THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME of his Collected Plays, Terence Rattigan recalls an early attempt at play-writing as a fourteenyear -old in a junior form at Harrow. The playlet was in French, and for it he was awarded two marks out of ten and the comment: "French execrable: theatre sense first class." The youthful Rattigan's flair for dramatic effect is clear from the scenario which he recalled in later life: "I ... plunged straight into the climactic scene of some plainly very turgid tragedy. The Comte de Boulogne, driven mad by his wife's passion for a handsome young gendarme, rushes in to the Comtesse's boudoir where she sits at her dressing-table having her hair done by three maids (in those days I was less economical in my use of small parts than I have since become). ... "1 In retrospect, the subject matter of this adolescent piece is noteworthy not so much for its ,precocity as for its prescience, for it embodies the theme to which Rattigan was to return time and again throughout his creative life. In play after play, Rattigan explores the triangular situation of a character torn between the rival claims of two potential partners. In Flare Path, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Variation on a Theme. Cause Celebre, and the film The Yellow Rolls-Royce. it is a woman torn between an older man and a younger; in Who is Sylvia? While the Sun Shines, Love in Idleness and A Bequest to the Nation, it is a man who is similarly tOfn between two women; and. just occasionally. Rattigan runs the gamut of conformity by presenting a character tom between the attractions of two rivals of different sexes, as in First Encounter and Variation on a Theme. 375 The eternal triangle is, of course, a time-honoured theme, and like most dramatic situations, it has been used for both tawdry sensationalism and sensitive exploration of character. Thus, it is for his handling of this recurring theme rather than for the theme itself that Rattigan must be judged. Of the various triangular situations enumerated above, it is the first that has proved most fertile for Rattigan- the woman married to an older man finding herself possessed by a deep and apparently uncontrollable passion for a younger man. This is the situation in three of his most accomplished works: The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Cause Celebre. In each of these, Rattigan uses the triangular situation to explore the nature of those emotions defined by that "portmanteau word" love, contrasting the passion which the woman feels for her young lover with the much more restrained, inhibited feelings which she has, or had, for her husband. It is significant that for his first major exploration of this theme, Rattigan should create a drama which depends for its full effect upon powerful classical reverberations, for such is the case with The Browning Version. The "version" referred to is, of course, Robert Browning's version of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, through which the public schoolmaster, Andrew Crocker-Harris, is guiding his enthusiastic but not very accurate pupil Taplow (a shade of Rattigan himseli). As Taplow enthuses over The Agamemnon- "it's rather a good plot, really: a wife murdering her husband and having a lover and all that'" - we become aware of the parallels between Crocker-Harris, his wife, Millie, her lover, Frank Hunter, and their counterparts in the classical drama. Not that Millie adopts the crude physical weapons of Clytemnestra ; instead, she uses the no less deadening battery of psychological warfare as she relentlessly humiliates and degrades her husband. In terms of exploration of character and motive, The Browning Version is closer to Euripides and his treatment of that other archetypal triangle (Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus) in Hippolylus than to Aeschylus's bloody chain of murder and revenge. By making the husband in his drama a classical scholar of considerable , albeit unrealised, distinction, Rattigan has created a character who might plausibly be expected to analyse his situation and articulate it. This is what Crocker-Harris does in a key speech at the...