A great injustice was done when the plays of Rattigan were swept aside by the Royal Court-led theatrical revolution of the 1950s
It has long been recognised that a great injustice was done when the plays of Terence Rattigan were swept aside by the Royal Court-led theatrical revolution of the 1950s. But the centenary of Rattigan's birth has not only brought a spate of revivals – the latest is In Praise of Love at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton. It has shown that the very qualities for which Rattigan was once so despised are a source of strength. His work was thought to epitomise a deeply English upper-class verbal and emotional reticence. But although it is true that Rattigan was, as Winston Churchill observed on a visit to Flare Path, "a master of understatement", his work is also a sustained assault on our fear of passion and commitment. In After the Dance, a marriage needlessly dies because neither partner can admit to the love they feel. The Deep Blue Sea, arguably Rattigan's greatest play, shows a heroine driven to attempted suicide by the desertion of a lover who cannot fulfil her sexual and emotional needs. And in Cause Célèbre, now at the Old Vic, he does belated justice to Alma Rattenbury, who in the 1930s was thought to have committed a crime worse than murder: the seduction of her 18-year-old chauffeur. It helped, of course, that Rattigan learned about dramatic structure by studying the Greeks at school. But the centenary revivals have forced us to recognise the real truth about Rattigan: that behind the quietly oblique dialogue lies a profound understanding of the human heart and an awareness of the illogicality of love.