In from the cold | 12 February 2011

Philip Ziegler puts the case for Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is celebrated with numerous revivals of his work

After decades in the doldrums, Terence Rattigan seems once more to be returning to popular and critical favour. Last year After the Dance was one of the National Theatre’s more emphatic successes, and the centenary of Rattigan’s birth is being celebrated by productions of his plays at the Old Vic, the Jermyn Street Theatre and in Northampton, West Yorkshire and Chichester. There is to be a Rattigan season at the British Film Institute, and a new screen adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan, it seems, is back.

Of course, he never really went away. His plays have never ceased to be standard material for repertory or amateur productions and though his films were rarely shown they were never totally forgotten. But nor, in terms at least of critical esteem, had he ever been entirely there. After various sighting shots his career began triumphantly in 1936 with French Without Tears, an uncomplicated and high-spirited farce based on his own experiences at a crammer in France. James Agate loathed it — ‘It is not witty. It has no plot. It is almost without characterisation’ — but he had to admit that it was a spectacular success. Most of the other critics liked it; the public loved it. Rattigan was hailed as the new Noël Coward. Unfortunately for him, it was assumed that his talent to amuse would be the hallmark of all his future work.

Though he scored several other successes during the second world war, it was not till 1946, with The Winslow Boy, that it occurred to the critics that he might be more than an accomplished farceur. Within the next few years came The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Separate Tables.