The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre is unusual among London's studio theatres in its location a few steps from Piccadilly Circus, and because of its atmosphere, which owes more to old-fashioned West End theatreland than your average slummy over-the-pub fringe venue. Rather than serving up revivals of familiar classics, it concentrates on new plays and unjustly forgotten works. It is the ideal venue for a biographical play about Terence Rattigan, who has swung back into fashion over the past two or three years as audiences and critics have rediscovered not just his talent for stagecraft and dialogue, but his insights into life's hidden emotional depths.
The Art of Concealment by Giles Cole is subtitled The Life of Terence Rattigan and it is exactly that -- a dramatisation of his passage from handsome young Harrovian cricketer in the 1930s through dazzling success and failure to his final years when a new generation of theatrical writers -- Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and their successors -- had elbowed him aside. Having struggled myself with writing a biographical play covering several decades of a man's life, I think Cole very nearly brings it off, though the play has a few flaws. It has eight characters when six would probably have sufficed, and it occasionally lapses into repetition and cliche, with one or two scenes too many.
The author puts the dying Rattigan of the 1970s on stage to comment on the antics of his younger self, and the scenes where they are on stage together enable the play to cast away its naturalistic origins to good effect. Cole also brings on Aunt Edna, the fictional middle-aged theatregoer whom Rattigan invented as an argument against the post-war dramatists who he felt lacked old-fashioned craftsmanship. Rattigan's nemesis, the star critic Kenneth Tynan, doesn't appear in person, but one of Rattigan's boyfriends reads his acid reviews. Cole writes convincing scenes showing Rattigan with his parents, and suggests that his lifelong concealment of his sexuality owed much to the example of his father, whose diplomatic career ended in disgrace. His adoring mother appears never to have quite grasped what was meant when her son was described as 'not a ladies' man'; there's an interesting contrast here with Noel Coward, whose equally adoring mother seems never to have had a problem with her son being homosexual. Like Coward, Rattigan never 'came out' and it would be hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that he should have done so in an era when gay sex was illegal. When in doubt, Rattigan put his career and reputation first, banishing his boyfriends back to the suburbs and keeping them away from his smart parties. Cole dramatises well the fierce jealousies between the playwright's lovers and his gay theatrical friends. 'Rent boy!' snarls Rattigan's producer friend Freddie Gilmour (a fictional amalgam of several real people) at one of his boyfriends.
The story is well told, up to a point. There are one or two key scenes in Rattigan's life which are under-exploited, such as his fateful decision to reject the idea of making the disgraced colonel in Separate Tables overtly gay in the American production of the play. Cole also leaves out the hilarious story of how the Lord Chamberlain blocked a satire on Hitler which Rattigan co-wrote, on the grounds that the German embassy -- which was sent the script and invited to comment -- didn't appreciate it. Cole's writing is a bit predictable, and falls well short of the bold imaginative poetry which Tom Stoppard achieved in The Invention of Love, a play on a similar theme which paired the young A E Housman with his older self.
The real problem is that while Rattigan the writer was a master of subtext, in Cole's play all the characters tend to say more or less exactly what they mean. This is more than a stylistic shortcoming; it robs the story of the kind of ambiguity that makes drama come alive. When the older Rattigan talks to the audience about his younger self, he's telling the truth. But this kind of monologue would be far more interesting if he were to tell a few lies. I prefer plays that leave a greater element of doubt hanging in the air. Characters who deceive themselves are more interesting than characters who deceive each other, and characters who attempt to deceive the audience are the most interesting of all.
Dominic Tighe is outstanding as the young Rattigan, and is well supported by Alistair Findlay as his older self. Graham Pountney doubles as the playwright's father Frank and his camp friend Freddie, while Judy Buxton plays both the adoring mother and the steely Aunt Edna. Christopher Morgan gives a nice understated performance as Rattigan's friend Cuthbert Worsley, while Daniel Bayle and Charlie Hollway are Rattigan's lovers Kenneth and Michael. None of them fall short, and I'm sorry that the eighth member of the cast Benedict Salter, playing the young Rattigan's friend Tony Goldschmidt, has only a brief cameo appearance in the opening scene.
Why? It was Goldschmidt, who was killed in World War Two, who was the co-author of Follow My Leader, which was written in 1938 but only got a licence from the Lord Chamberlain once the war was already under way. Past its sell-by date, it arrived in the West End in January 1940 and limped along for 16 performances. The play, archived in the Lord Chamberlain's files in the British Library, is pretty feeble but has one excellent joke; when the Patriots Party in Moronia try to blow up the embassy of neighbouring Neurasthenia, they destroy the British embassy by mistake, whereupon the British ambassador apologises.
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