“The love that dare not speak its name” has become the love that just won’t shut up. So said Canadian writer Robertson Davies. Certainly after decades, centuries (depending on who you talk to and what history you read) of repression, homosexuals have taken full advantage of new freedom to express themselves, and heck, just be themselves and not have to hide. I’d suggest this is a natural reaction to being allowed to be, after so long. Not that the struggle is over, not here with bullying and bashings, and certainly not in more repressive regimes where homosexuality is illegal and severely punished. So I dare say the love that won’t shut up will keep talking for some time yet.
Sean O’Connor is a London-based theatre producer and director, and I’ve just read his 1997 book, Straight Acting: Popular gay drama from Wilde to Rattigan. It struck me as an odd title, as there was very little gay drama as such (not on stage, at least) in that period. But O’Connor is writing about drama written by gay playwrights, who were enormously successful. His main focus is on Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, with sidelines on many others.
I was a bit worried that this book was going to militantly homosexual ie insisting that the plays have to be read from a homosexual point of view, cannot be appreciated unless read in that way, and that you straights have been missing the point for decades. I was completely wrong. This is an intelligent survey of the writers’ work, with an acknowledgment and an understanding of the lives of these men, and the conditions under which they worked. O’Connor is a good writer.
The most important thing is that these authors wrote good plays. They worked for audiences whether or not they were aware of any possible gay subtext. We’re not that much smarter now than they were then, though it’s pretty to think so. Audiences could spot the characters that were sexually ambiguous just as easily as we can. Nor did the writers simply make all their gay characters women. O’Connor calls this accusation of ‘literary transvestism’ “easy, but not helpful.” Blanche Dubois is not Tennessee Williams in drag and it’s an insult to suggest she is. O’Connor calls this typical of the misogyny and homophobia of theatre criticism. Yes, in a different age, all these men would probably have written different plays. But the plays they wrote were so successful, and often so good, that one wonders what would have been better had they been different.
Rattigan in particular was quite open about what he would have changed if he had been able. The American version of “Separate Tables” was supposed to be quite different. If you don’t know the work, it is two one-act plays that take place at the same English boarding house, some months apart. The main characters are doubled, while the secondary characters appear in both. The second play concerns The Major, who by the conclusion is revealed as both a bogus officer and a man of dubious sexual practices. As written, he is interfering with women in cinemas. On Broadway, free from the Lord Chancellor’s interference, Rattigan wanted to make him homosexual. In fact, you can read the re-written scenes in Rattigan’s collected works. But the US producer thought it would lose audience and went with the original. The movie also went with the original, though it merged the two stories into one timeline. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were going to play both couples at the heart of each story but at that point stepped aside. David Niven gave his best performance as The Major, and won an Oscar for it. I don’t know if the play gets produced nowadays with the original scenes or the alternative scenes. And I don’t suppose it matters.
After reading O’Connor’s book, I bought second-hand The Rattigan Version: The Theatre of Character by B A Young, which is a little dull and disappointing. After O’Connor’s book I was hoping for something more interesting and insightful about his plays. The readings are shallow. Perhaps Young felt constrained about delving too deeply into the plays with his friend Rattigan still alive, or perhaps he isn’t a good enough writer. Either way, it was a letdown. But Young is right; Rattigan’s is the theatre of character. The plot may be thin, but the characters stay with you.
I read O’Connor is making a movie of Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea,’ one of Rattigan’s major successes. I saw ‘In Praise of Love’ on the West End many years ago, which I thought was a lovely play, and enjoyed the recent film of ‘‘The Winslow Boy,’ less so ‘The Browning Version.’ Rattigan did fall out of favour as too polite and middle-class. But many writers fall out of favour, to our loss, only to come back. Perhaps O’Connor will bring us back Rattigan.
PS Both these books are out of print - libraries and second hand dealers are they go if you want a read.
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