cover image The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character

The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character

B. A. Young. Atheneum Books, $18.95 (228pp) ISBN 978-0-689-11952-1

A financially successful playwright (The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables and 20 others), an intimate of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, notable enough to lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, ``Terry'' Rattigan (1911-1977), according to British critic Young, was a schoolboy who never grew up. Ably as he manipulated the characters in his scripts to provide the dramatic impact he soughtwhether they were ancient Greeks or desert Arabsthey were always based on people he knew from Harrow or Oxford or London. He never married and never involved himself in anything but the theater, so Young's ``critical biography'' describes not so much the grownup schoolboy as the dramatist of ``character.'' And in the end the author regards him as a ``reasonably important,'' ``estimable'' playwright, not a very good literary man, who wrote only what he thought the public wanted to hear. Photos not seen by PW. (May)