Love-hate relationship with cinema

Rattigan’s biographer Michael Darlow, who is also deeply involved with events at the CFT, will speak on Rattigan’s films for the Chichester International Film Festival (Saturday, August 20).

“Rattigan had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the cinema really,” Michael says. “He knew he wanted to be a playwright from when he was taken to see Cinderella when he was six. There certainly appears to be quite a lot of supporting evidence for that. From then on, he was totally theatre mad.

“He wrote a play with a mate whilst he was at Oxford. He was very much a 1930s young man at that period, and they wrote this play set in Oxford which was taken on by a theatre in Kew. I rather suspect that they had to put some money into it.

“And the play caused a minor scandal. You got a picture of university life that was a little bit too frank for the proctors - drinking, sex, gambling… and it was also curiously ahead of its time with a strong hint at a homosexual relationship between two of the students.”

The piece was transferred to the Comedy Theatre at which point Rattigan was convinced he was on his way as a playwright. But the play promptly closed, leaving him penniless, at which point his father gave him two years to make his way as a playwright. If he didn’t succeed, then the young Rattigan would have to accept whatever job his father secured for him.

When the plays didn’t come off, Rattigan found himself writing screenplays - badly. His first, a gipsy romance, was spectacularly ripped up in his face by his boss. When he left, found behind the radiator, was the publication detailing studio rules for scriptwriters. Across his copy Rattigan had written the word “Balls!”

However, Rattigan went on to become a fine screenwriter, most particularly - Michael feels - in his original works for the screen, rather than in the screen adaptations of his plays.

And oddly, Michael believes, once his plays became unfashionable with the advent of John Osborne et al, then his screenwriting became even better…