The Return of Terence Rattigan

Last year the centenary of the birth of the English playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan was celebrated in Britain by revivals of two of his best plays, Cause Célèbre and Flare Path, and a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea. The critical disdain for the playwright’s commercialism and insistence on writing so-called well-made plays, which followed the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, seems forgotten. As for the British public, the performances of Flare Path and Cause Célèbre I attended early last year were crowded with enthusiastic theatregoers. In Australia, however, the revival of Rattigan’s reputation has gone almost unnoticed. Terence Davies’s new film version of The Deep Blue Sea opened in the art houses to some excellent reviews, but at the time of writing only the Chauvel and the Cremorne Orpheum were screening it in Sydney.

This is very different from the 1940s and 1950s, when Rattigan wrote screenplays for some of the best British films of…