Harlequinade & All On Her Own (NHB Modern Plays)

Terence Rattigan

HARLEQUINADE

and

ALL ON HER OWN

Contents

Title Page

Introduction by Michael Darlow

Production Details

Interview with Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford

Interview with Zoë Wanamaker

Interview with Christopher Oram

Harlequinade

All On Her Own

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Michael Darlow

These two one-act plays, produced as a double bill in the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s 2015–16 season at London’s Garrick Theatre, were written on either side of the great divide in Terence Rattigan’s career. Harlequinade was first produced in 1948, when Rattigan was widely regarded as Britain’s finest practising playwright; All On Her Own was written in 1968, the period when his critical reputation was at its lowest.

The contrast between the two plays could not be greater either. All On Her Own is about love and the need to feel needed, the subject to which Rattigan returned repeatedly. Harlequinade, which Rattigan described as ‘a farce of character’, is about Rattigan’s greatest love of all – the theatre.

Rattigan was born in South Kensington on 10th June 1911, the second son of the troubled marriage of Frank, a rising young diplomat, and Vera, a strong-minded Edwardian beauty. Because of his parents’ prolonged postings overseas, for much of his early life he was left in the care of a grandmother, becoming increasingly unhappy and withdrawn. Family friends came to refer to him as ‘That poor lost child, Terry Rattigan’.

He was first taken to the theatre by an aunt when he was about seven. The play was Cinderella, and he was completely captivated: ‘I believed in everything I saw on that stage… it was important to me that Cinderella should go to the ball and marry the prince.’ From that moment he became determined to become a playwright.

In 1933, while he was at Oxford, a play he had written with a fellow undergraduate, First Episode, was produced at a small theatre in Kew. With its depiction of Oxford student life – drunken parties, gambling, casual sex – it provoked a small sensation and was transferred into the West End. Buoyed up by this brush with success, Rattigan left Oxford without taking a degree and moved into a London flat to embark on a career as a dramatist. But just weeks later the play closed. Broke, Rattigan was forced to return home and throw himself on his parents’ mercy.

Although displeased by his son’s precipitate decision to leave Oxford without a degree, his father agreed to pay him a small allowance to stay at home and write plays on condition that if, after two years, he had not succeeded as a playwright he would take whatever job could be found for him.

For the next two years Rattigan wrote play after play but each one was rejected. So, with the two years up, he took a lowly hack job as a member of a team of writers kept on the payroll at Warner Brothers Studios in Teddington to write additional lines of dialogue for whatever film was in production at the studios. Then, just weeks later, his luck changed. In November 1936 one of his previously rejected comedies, French Without Tears, was rushed into production as a stopgap at the Criterion Theatre. It was a surprise smash-hit. It ran for over 1,000 performances and made Rattigan and its young cast, including Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard and Roland Culver, famous.

This sudden success after the years of rejection caused a reaction which Rattigan later described as a nervous breakdown. In the next six years he completed just two plays: Follow My Leader – co-written with a friend from Oxford, a satire on Hitler and the British policy of appeasement, which was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on the grounds that it might offend Hitler – and a drama, After the Dance, which opened in June 1939 to good notices but, with the approach of war, closed after just sixty performances.

Advised by a psychiatrist to join up and experience active service, Rattigan became an air gunner in RAF Coastal Command. The fierce concentration, shared danger and camaraderie of life in the RAF cured Rattigan’s ‘writer’s block’ and, writing in his off-duty hours, hit after hit flowed from his pen – Flare Path (1942), While the Sun Shines (1943), Love in Idleness (1944), The Winslow Boy (1946), plus the scripts for five well-received films. In 1948 came Playbill, two one-act plays – The Browning Version and Harlequinade. More successes followed, including The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954). However, by the 1950s this almost unfailing run of successes had begun to make Rattigan suspect. Surely, no playwright who was as consistently successful as he was could really be that good? A repertory theatre manager told him: ‘We so like putting on your plays here, Mr Rattigan. They pay for the good ones.’

By 1956, with the arrival of a new, younger generation, the start of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, followed by Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and the first visit to London of the Berliner Ensemble with plays by Bertolt Brecht, Rattigan’s reputation had undergone a complete sea change. Now he was seen as the standard bearer for an old, out-of-touch theatre, cut off from the realities of most ordinary people’s lives. Despite his unfailingly calm and unruffled demeanour, Rattigan had always suffered from a deep lack of self-confidence and became hugely discouraged. In the remaining twenty-one years of his life he wrote just five plays and another one-act double bill. Most of his time was given over to writing highly paid Hollywood films. His reputation only started to recover towards the end of his life and it was not until his centenary in 2011, with the dozens of revivals of his plays, seasons of his films, exhibitions, TV programmes and articles, that his qualities came to be fully recognised.

All On Her Own was the result of a 1968 BBC2 Television commission to thirteen well-known writers (others included J.B. Priestley, John Mortimer and Emlyn Williams) to write a short solo play for an actress of their choice. It owes much to Rattigan’s own experience and his reassessment of his parents’ relationship. For most of his adult life Rattigan had blamed his father for the difficulties in his parents’ marriage – his numerous affairs and often boorish attitude to his mother’s interests. But by 1967, when he started work on the play, his father was dead and his mother had become an increasingly difficult and self-centred old lady, and Rattigan had begun to suspect that the problems in the marriage had also been down to his mother; to her unbending attitudes, her buttoned-up views on sex and her unconcealed disappointment with her husband