Overview

In his lifetime he was a well-known public figure, yet despite his friendships he always publicly hid his homosexuality. In this biography, Michael Darlow has described this aspect of Rattigan''s life and fully considers it in relation to his work.'

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Reviews

Have the late Terence Rattigan's plays (The Window Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables, etc.) come to be unfairly under-valued because of his position, in later years, as a semi-reluctant symbol of the Establishment and old-fashioned commercial craftsmanship? Darlow and Hodson believe so, and this critical biography attempts to rehabilitate Rattigan's serious reputation as a moral dramatist - by emphasizing his liberal humanism and by relating the plays to Rattigan's guilt-and conflict-ridden homosexuality. The results are mixed. Rattigan's uneventful, fairly glamorous life - from Harrow and Oxford to West End success to a series of terminal illnesses - is well-researched and gracefully told, with candid yet tasteful treatment of his half-secret, often humiliating, sex life ( Why are there always so many young men and so few girls at Terence's parties? his mother continued to ask through the 1950s). And the authors do a convincing job of laying bare the covered-over homosexual situations and torments in such plays as The Deep Blue Sea - though they're also wise enough to note that the plays are probably better for the socially necessary disguisings. But, while Darlow and Hodson are on solid ground when casting Rattigan as an affirmative writer who approaches the difficulties of love and the inequality of passion with appeals for sympathy and tolerance, they never really manage to argue away Rattigan's contrivances and shallowness; they seem clearly out of their depth when disputing Kenneth Tynan's negative critiques; and their inflated claims for some of the plays - like In Praise of Love - compound a recurring tone of whiny fatuousness ( Why, then, has his achievement still not been generally recognized? ). As a final appraisal, then, this is less than reliable, and must be balanced against the tougher views of Tynan and others. As a compassionate biography and conscientious play-by-play study, however, it's solid, readable, and, on some counts, freshly informative. (Kirkus Reviews)

It can only be a matter of time before Terence Rattigan, the master craftsman of 20th-century playwriting, is back in favour and this full, critical biography is timely. The author tells of Rattigan's rather miserable childhood (continually embarrassed by a philandering father and by a homosexuality he could never confess), through the war (when he was a brave and adventurous airman) to a somewhat sad old age, when he knew that he was out of fashion and suspected his plays would never be revived. They will, of course, and Darlow's judgement of them is sound. (Kirkus UK)

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