Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) enjoyed huge success from 1936 (the year of his smash-hit, French Without Tears) until 1956, the year of the arrival of John Osborne and Look Back in Anger and all the Angry Young Men, when he and Nóel Coward fell from favour. He never recovered his popularity and, unlike Coward, who had his renaissance while he was still alive, he had to wait for his renaissance until after his death.
In Praise of Love, which premiered in 1973, was a one-act play, which dealt with a wife’s efforts to shield her selfish, boorish, brusque husband from the knowledge that she is dying. The irony is that he knows what she is doing, but thinks she doesn’t and so continues his appalling patronising behaviour for fear that if he changes the habits of a lifetime, she will guess she must be really ill.
The play was loosely based on the marriage of Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall. She had died of leukaemia. The actors, like the characters in the play, had also kept up the pretence to the very end.
Harrison, far from being upset by the play, decided he wanted to be in it and Rattigan turned it into a full-length drama, which was then performed in New York. It is this version that is now being staged with Dominic Rowan and Clare Price in the lead roles and Joe Edgar as their son.
“I am as God made me, an uncaring shit,” says the husband.” Rowan shouts far too much.
Rattigan defines le vice anglais as not flagellation and pederasty (as the French would have everybody believe) but “our refusal to admit to an emotion.” It is this very English reticence, which is at the very heart of all his work and particularly so here.
Watching the play again, after all these years, it didn’t seem as good nor as poignant as I had remembered it. I did wonder if it might have been better to revive the original one-acter.
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