Terence Rattigan

A moving story of love and loyalty, courage and fear, based on Terence Rattigan's own experiences as a tail gunner in the Second World War. 1942. The Falcon Hotel, on the Lincolnshire coast. RAF bomber pilot Teddy is celebrating a reunion with his actress wife Patricia. When Peter, Patricia's ex-lover and Hollywood heart-throb, arrives and an urgent bombing mission over Germany is ordered, Patricia finds herself at the centre of an emotional conflict as unpredictable as the war in the skies. Terence Rattigan's play Flare Path was first produced at the Apollo Theatre, London, in August 1942. It was revived as part of the Rattigan Centenary celebrations at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in March 2011. This edition contains an authoritative introduction by Rattigan scholar Dan Rebellato.

Drama / Characters: 5 male, 3 femaleScenery: InteriorHester Collyer's husband is a rich, talented lawyer; her lover, Freddie, is neither Hester's moral nor intellectual equal, but Hester loves him with an intensity that few, and especially not Freddie, are capable of matching. They are death to each other. Hester is driven to attempt suicide. Between the devil and the deep blue sea the latter looks very attractive. She is saved by Miller, a disbarred doctor, and through him learns how to transcend both hope and despair.

Gregor Antonescu, a tycoon of Hungarian origin, arrives at the Greenwich Village apartment of his illegitimate son, Basil, for a business meeting to discuss a highly-profitable merger. After achieving apparent success, he finds everything collapsing around him and learns from Basil that a warrant is out for his arrest. Basil offers help, but Gregor acquires a conscience for the first time in his life and determines his own way out. A revival of this tense, psychological drama was seen to critical acclaim at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, starring David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu.

Rattigan's well-loved play about an unpopular schoolmaster who snatches a last shred of dignity from the collapse of his career and his marriage. Twice filmed (with Michael Redgrave and Albert Finney) and frequently revived. Andrew Crocker-Harris' wife Millie has become embittered and fatigued by her husband's lack of passion and ambition. On the verge of retirement, and divorce, Andrew is forced to come to terms with the platitude his life has become. Then John Taplow, a previously unnoticed pupil, gives Andrew an unexpected parting gift: a second-hand copy of Robert Browning's translation of Agamemnon – a gift which offers not only a opportunity for redemption, but the chance to gain back some dignity. The Browning Version was premiered at the Phoenix Theatre, London, in September 1948. This volume also contains Harlequinade, a farce about a touring theatre troupe, written to accompany The Browning Version in a double-bill under the joint title, Playbill. 'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington This edition includes an authoritative introduction and biographical sketch by Rattigan scholar Dan Rebellato, along with a chronology of his plays.

An almost unbearably moving story of veiled emotions running deep, Terence Rattigan's In Praise of Love is based on the true life situation of Rex Harrison's wife, Kay Kendall, and her early death from cancer. Lydia is shielding her husband, Sebastian, from the knowledge that she is dying from leukaemia. But Sebastian does know and is seeking to spare her. She dies without either of them openly acknowledging their true feelings... The play was first produced as a one-act play under the title After Lydia in a double-bill with the short farce, Before Dawn, at the Duchess Theatre, London, in September 1973. Rattigan reworked and extended the play as In Praise of Love for its New York premiere at the Morosco Theatre in December 1974, starring Rex Harrison himself. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology. 'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington

Based on the real-life court case of a young naval cadet unjustly accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and first staged in 1946, The Winslow Boy has been revived many times since. Ronnie Winslow is expelled from naval college, having been accused of petty theft. Enraged, his father Arthur engages a lawyer to challenge the Admiralty to prove the charges in court – but public opinion is very much against the Winslows, and each member of the family is suffering... Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy was first produced (after a brief pre-London tour) at the Lyric Theatre, London, in May 1946. This edition includes an authoritative introduction by Dan Rebellato, a biographical sketch and a chronology.

Two linked one-act plays set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth. In the first of the plays, Table by the Window, a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other, Table Number Seven, a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major accused of importuning women in a local cinema. Terence Rattigan's play Separate Tables was first produced at the St. James's Theatre, London, in September 1954. In an alternative version, only recently discovered among Rattigan's papers, the major's offence was revealed to be homosexual; these 'alternative' scenes are published here for the first time. This edition, edited and introduced by Dan Rebellato, includes a biographical sketch and chronology. 'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington

Written in the early fifties when Rattigan was at the height of his powers, The Deep Blue Sea is a powerful account of lives blighted by love - or the lack of it. The play opens with the failed suicide of Hester Collyer (Peggy Ashcroft in the first production), who has deserted her husband for the raffish charms of an ex-fighter pilot. Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea was first performed at the Duchess Theatre in the West End in March 1952. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology. 'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington

Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance is a brilliant attack on the hedonistic lifestyle of the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s and 30s. David is a high-living, hard-drinking, successful writer involved with two women: his wife Joan and an earnest-minded younger woman, Helen. When Joan commits suicide, David considers following her, but instead returns to a life of parties and drinking. After the Dance was first produced at the St James’s Theatre, London, in June l939. It signalled a more serious direction in Rattigan's writing after the relative frivolity of the hugely successful French Without Tears. It opened to euphoric reviews, but only a month later the European crisis was darkening the national mood and audiences began to dwindle. The play was pulled in August after only sixty performances. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

A masterpiece of light comedy from Terence Rattigan, about a group of bright young things attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid myriad distractions. French Without Tears is the play that first made Rattigan's name, and ran for over a thousand performances in the 1930s. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan" (Guardian) This selection from the best of Rattigan's work from the '50s onwards includes two of his most popular plays, The Deep Blue Sea which movingly depicts the closing stages of a hopeless, adulterous, socially inequitable love affair between an RAF war hero and a judge's wife; Separate Tables, printed in its original version for the first time, comprises two one-act plays both set in a private hotel in Bournemouth but with a different pair of principal characters - in one a disgraced politician and his estranged wife, in the other, a bogus major and young woman dominated by her mother "This gay version hardly departs from the original, yet converts a conventional West End drama into a forceful attack upon 1950s witch-hunts and stigmatising of homosexuals...how luminously Rattigan evokes the sexually intolerant and phobic attitudes of fifties middle England" (Evening Standard); the volume closes with In Praise of Love, in which a woman and her husband persist in gallantly deceiving one another each pretending to be unaware that she is fatally ill.

Deception is the linchpin of this sophisticated comedy drama about a fatally ill wife and her ineffectual husband.

An hilarious retelling of the play and opera Tosca, with Scarpia as a swaggering villain who proves to be impotent, Tosca as a proud beauty and a Captain who gets confused as to whether Scarpia means that Tosca's lover should really be executed ... or only appear to be. Tosca's attempt to stab Scarpia is foiled by his knife-proof vest.1 woman, 3 men

"Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan" (Guardian) Constantly revived on stage, radio and television, Rattigan's plays demonstrate their continuing power to hold and move audiences. This volume contains his best work from the thirties and forties, including his first play French Without Tears, about a group of "bright young things" attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid numerous distractions. The second play The Winslow Boy, based on an actual case, is the powerful, deliberately well-made drama of a father's attempts to clear his cadet son's name against the assembled might of Britain's naval establishment - the Admiralty. Completing the volume are two one-act plays Harlequinade, a sustained joke against some well-worn theatrical conventions and The Browning Version which portrays a disliked classics master, Crocker-Harris on the point of retiring after eighteen years of unsuccessful teaching "well up there among the dozen greatest plays written in this country this century." (The Spectator) "Terence Rattigan is the English Tennessee Williams. He maps out the same fatal divorce between the spiritual and the physical, the same drama of lost souls and misdirected lusts, of people stranded with their frustrations, blasted by guilt and reaching out for rescue that they know full well will fail" (Sunday Times)

Filmed as The Way to the Stars and set in the 1940s, Rattigan's famous play concerns Patricia's love for a film actor, despite her marriage to Flight-Lieutenant Teddy Graham. Going to the hotel to break with Teddy, followed by Peter, Pat encounters Doris, married to a Polish Count, who is one of two pilots not to return from a bombing raid. Hearing the Count's last letter, Pat realizes how much Teddy needs her, and gives Peter his dismissal.

Terence Rattigan Characters: 15 male, 5 female, 1 boy Unit set. A woman on trial with her 20 years younger lover for the murder of her husband creates the title drama in this incendiary recreation of the infamous case of Alma Rattenbury and 18 year-old George Percy Stoner. In 1935, when accused of murdering her husband in their Bournemouth home, the headlines created an early tabloid sensation as woman and boy both take the blame, while sexual freedom is cast in sharp relief against the the stifling morality of post-Victorian England. From the celebrated author of Separate Tables and The Browning Version, Cause Celebre will be revived at London's Old Vic in Spring 2011. "No one alive writes with such understanding of sexual love or with such profound pity for its victims."-Daily Telegraph, London

These two plays are set in a shabby genteel hotel on England's south coast. Except for the two leads in each (which may be doubled) the same characters appear in both. In Table by the Window, a down-at-the-heels journalist is confronted by his ex-wife, a former model who provoked him to the violent act that sent him to prison, destroying his future. Still in love, they nevertheless go through another terrible scene and it is the hotel manager, Miss Cooper, who helps repair their broken lives. In Table Number Seven, a 'self-made' army colonel without any true background and education to which he lays claim, finds solace with a spinster over the objections of her ruthless, domineering mother. When a sordid scandal threatens to drive them apart, Miss Cooper again comes to the rescue.

Cadet Ronnie Winslow is expelled from the Royal Naval College accused of stealing. His father, refusing to believe his guilt and dissatisfied with the manner in which the investigation was conducted, demands a new inquiry. This is refused and Arthur Winslow settles down to fight for his son's honour. Following an independent inquiry the matter is taken to the House of Commons but Arthur ruins himself financially and in health in the process. But his stubbornness wins, a civil trial is allowed and Ronnie is acquitted.