Turning Terence Rattigan into a martyr smacks of the wheedling Tory tone of self-righteous privilege
Of course, you must expect it: in rightwing times, rightwing art flourishes. In the London theatre, the Donmar Warehouse has prospered by seeking out religious mystic playwrights of the last century like TS Eliot and Enid Bagnold, while a journey through the West End today offers almost no new plays of any intelligence. At the cinema, The King's Speech has swept all before it, while the best British film of last year, The Arbor, being about women on a Bradford council estate, has barely been seen. And on television the nation has been sitting down on Sundays to an Edwardian fiction, Downton Abbey, in which the upper classes are revealed, to the astonishment of the grateful viewer, to be quaintly caring about the welfare of the lower. But in this national festival of reaction, the attempt not just to extol but to redeem from martyrdom the eminent playwright Terence Rattigan represents the most intriguing cultural rejig of all.
Contrary to almost everything you may have read in this centenary year of his birth, Rattigan is a dramatist who has never been far from the public eye. For as long as I can remember there have been excellent revivals of his major works, especially on television. I first saw Virginia McKenna being a memorably good Hester in The Deep Blue Sea in 1974, and I have certainly never forgotten Alan Badel's Arctic chill as Sir Robert Morton in a 1977 Winslow Boy.
It is true that thanks to the revelatory performance of Penelope Wilton – again in The Deep Blue Sea, this time at the Almeida in 1993 – a new generation marvelled at how potent Rattigan could be when he addressed his most profound subject: man and woman's helplessness in the face of their own true character. It was the eerie way in which Wilton managed to be both perfectly in period and at the same time wholly contemporary that made this the definitive Rattigan production. But even then it did not seem as if we were being introduced to a play whose outline – woman gives everything up for sex – was not familiar already.
Why then is it essential to the temper of the times to pretend that Rattigan, of all playwrights, has been uniquely hard done by? It has become a commonplace of commentary to turn him into some sort of public school victim whose fall from grace can be put down to nasty goings-on initiated by yobs at the Royal Court and Stratford East in the 1950s. In this seigniorial rewriting of history, the long-delayed opening up of the British stage to working-class voices in two notably small auditoriums on either side of London took place at the expense of a solid craftsman whose skilful celebrations of English middle-class reticence fell unfairly out of favour.
There are so many misconceptions in this now standard narrative that it is hard to know where to begin. For once in theatrical history, it is impossible to blame the critics. If we are seriously to believe, as is claimed, that Rattigan was disheartened into silence by some latterly indifferent reviews for his commercial plays about Horatio Nelson and TE Lawrence, then let us take a look, please, at the far more brutal treatment handed out to those very same playwrights – Bond, Arden and Osborne – who in rightwing mythology are supposed to have supplanted him. And let us also look at just how limited the influence of George Devine and Joan Littlewood has remained.
To this day our dramatic ecology is much as it has always been: apolitical formalist experiment and classical revival jostling in pleasant diversity alongside vehicles for jetted-in Hollywood stars and evenings of musical uplift. The glories of the British theatre remain the brilliance of its actors and the vibrancies of its small spaces. At no point have revolutionaries from Sloane Square looked like taking over the show.
Those of us who lived through the Thatcher years will remember how, for the first time, the powerful and successful were encouraged to develop an ugly vein of grievance. To the beaming approval of the prime minister, fabulously wealthy business folk took to telling us how little appreciated they were, and how intolerable it was to carry an equal burden of taxation and misunderstanding. With Cameron in charge this wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege is back in the public discourse.
The attempt to turn Rattigan into a martyr is simply its cultural equivalent. The truth is that Rattigan was inconsistent, like most of us. Alongside some other lasting plays and films, he achieved two unarguable masterpieces, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea, both of which show that his attitude to the value of emotional reticence was a great deal more ambivalent than is generally made out. He also, God help us, dreamt up audience punishments called The Prince and the Showgirl and The Yellow Rolls-Royce.
During the preparation for a BBC4 documentary to be shown this summer, I was asked a question which was implicitly far more insulting than anything Rattigan's enemies ever flung at him. The researcher wanted to know if it had not been for the emergence of the angry young men whether Rattigan would have gone on to write many more great plays. I tried to explain that most writers, at most times, are doing their best. Their success or failure in mining their imagination depends principally on the limits of that imagination. If they have any courage or experience at all, they are unlikely to be put off by the irrationality of the artistic stock exchange.
Rattigan must indeed have suffered by not being invited to be part of Laurence Olivier's nascent National Theatre in 1963. But if someone must write, they must. The fact that a crop of Rattigan revivals is being hailed in some circles as the realignment of the whole cultural globe back on to its natural axis says more about us, I'm afraid, than it does about him.• David Hare's new curtain-raiser to The Browning Version, South Downs, will play in a double-bill at the Chichester Festival Theatre in September