The Sleeping Prince

Rattigan, who had been a playwright since leaving Oxford University at the age of 22, boasted of his workmanship---"I believe sloppy construction, untidy technique, and lack of craftsmanship to be great faults"---and of his ability to please the British playgoer, the archetypical "Aunt Edna," a "middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady with time on show more her hands." Not surprisingly, he fell out of favor in the Britain of the 1960s. (He had never been particularly popular in the United States, which looked on his work as inspirationally lacking.) At the time of his death, criticism, still taking him at his word, faintly praised Rattigan's expositions, his management of interleaving characters (as in Separate Tables, 1954), and his artful episodic development in Ross (1960). But Darlow and Hodson's revelations of Rattigan's tormented personal life have helped readers acknowledge that, despite imposed or sentimental endings, his plays are often full of genuine anguish---in the relations of parents and children (Man and Boy, 1963) and obsessed lovers (The Deep Blue Sea, 1952), and in recognition of weakness that vitiates heroism (Ross, 1960, which is based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. And revivals of the 1948 play The Browning Version (at the National Theatre) and of The Winslow Boy (1946) moved the critic Harold Hobson to concede that "there are many things in Rattigan that have not yet been properly perceived." (Bowker Author Biography) show less