Cause Célèbre

by Terence Rattigan

  She goes to a dresser and matter-of-factly tries the sharpness of one or two knives, selecting one.

  God give me the courage! Don’t let me funk it, like I did with the bus!

  She has opened her mackintosh, and now opens her blouse on the left side, fumbling to find her heart.

  Oh why not? Why not?

  She pulls the curtains a little open.

  Why not do it looking at them?

  She gazes at the unseen flowers for some time.

  Please God – look after my children… And give me the strength – one must have strength – God give me the strength –

  She stabs herself very hard four times in quick succession.

  Not – the right – place – again –

  She stabs again.

  Yes. That’s it. Once more – if I can… Just once more – Oh God let me – once more – just give me peace –

  She stabs herself for the last time. In falling dead, she pulls the curtains down from the pelmet boards and they half cover her lifeless body. From the front door now comes a loud imperious knocking.13

  Even when writing his best plays, Rattigan used drafts to get bad ideas out of his system.14 Yet it’s clear that the problem is finding a stage equivalent to the epic fluidity that he’d discovered when telling his story on the radio.

  Rattigan found it difficult working with Robert Chetwyn and asked him to be replaced, which he was, by Peter Coe. Unfortunately, Rattigan was not happy with him either. Coe was delighted by the documentary aspects of the play, but was quite unconvinced by the Mrs Davenport plot. In addition, his staging ideas were too extravagant and expensive.15 In the meantime, Dorothy Tutin had become unavailable. Without a script, a director, or a leading lady, the play seemed hopeless, until Robin Midgley appeared. Midgley was the Artistic Director of the Leicester Haymarket, which is where he proposed it open, prior to a London run. Rattigan was particularly pleased to hear that he thought the play was certainly stageworthy and that a workable draft was already there, somewhere in the one radio and two stage scripts Rattigan had already written.

  Midgley arrived in Bermuda with a collage of the three versions to serve as a starting point for him to help Rattigan complete a finished script. The playwright was delighted with his ideas and the two men worked well together for two weeks. Although Rattigan was ill, they worked for two hours each morning and two hours each afternoon, Rattigan dictating scenes, and Midgley taking his notes away and typing them up. After his return to London, Midgley produced a further neatened-up copy of the script, to which Rattigan made some small amendments, and the play went into rehearsal in the spring of 1977.

  Some of the first critics of the play complained that the stage version was rather close to the radio original. Rattigan’s friend, the critic B. A. Young, declares flatly that the resultant stage version ‘was not very different from the radio play’.16 This is completely mistaken. Together, Rattigan and Midgley have turned the play inside out, creating certainly the most structurally radical play Rattigan ever wrote. Irving Wardle’s review of the premiere describes it as ‘a perfectly coherent picture, smashed to fragments and regrouped into a mosaic’.17

  While the radio play is completely chronological, except for two flashbacks, the stage play leaps backwards and forwards in time, flashing between stories, taking us into Alma and Edith’s subjective experiences of the trial, overlaying scenes imagistically on top of one another. There had been hints of this in plays like Adventure Story, Ross and Bequest to the Nation; Rattigan’s determination to use theatre lighting to guide our attention and mood is something he had tried a little of in In Praise of Love, but here the confidence and boldness is much greater.

  Where the former play had been all restraint and understatement, in the stage version Rattigan embraced the shattering and disruptive imagery of the story to offer a theatrical experience that was much more to do with 1977 than 1935. Less than ten years after the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of theatre, the landscape of British playwriting had changed utterly. New playwrights like David Hare, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond and Snoo Wilson worked with shocking, unsettling images of juxtaposed violence and sexuality, laughter and aggression: Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians (1975) performing a stand-up comedy act of violent class hatred; two Roman legionaries in ancient Britain raping and killing a boy druid in Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980); seventeenth-century Londoners eating a picnic at the foot of a gibbet on which is stretched the dead body of a woman thief in Bond’s Bingo (1973). These were the new images of British theatre.

  As Neil Bartlett, director of the play’s first major revival, points out, Rattigan makes common cause with this new generation in his play:

  The key images of the play are as casually shocking as anything else in the drama of the decade; a drunken, barefoot woman vomiting into a pool of her husband’s blood; a suicidal teenager choking on a bathroom floor; an unemployed builder dressed up in silk pyjamas from Harrods. Throughout all of this, well-dressed women read The Times and well-spoken lawyers pronounce the law, but to no effect. Rattigan’s England, in 1976, is not a safe or reassuring place.18

  The splintered structure of the theatrical Cause Célèbre is a vision of a world in moral disarray, its misdirected fury turned not against murder but sexual desire.

  Rattigan was determined that his final play – as he described it to friends – would not be dismissed as a museum piece. Thirty years before he had, after all, written a successful play about another celebrated legal case in The Winslow Boy. The Archer-Shee trial was a cause célèbre of the Edwardian era, and in writing his version of the story, Rattigan was keen to emulate the theatrical styles of its time. But here he is keen to emphasise that the events of the play are of contemporary significance. In the production notes for the radio play, he states that he has changed the language of the barristers because he didn’t want to write a series of ‘Robert Mortons’ (Morton was eminent QC and star turn of The Winslow Boy).19 He makes almost no attempt to mimic the vocabulary or speech patterns of the 1930s, even though he was working from trial transcripts. Even the gestures towards it in the radio play – the use of the word ‘connection’ as a thirties legal euphemism for sex – is removed when preparing the stage version. Indeed, his preferred title for the play was A Woman of Principle, an elegant title that referred ambiguously to Alma and Edith, but he was so concerned that the play sounded old-fashioned (perhaps thinking of Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance) that he took the unusual step of writing to two theatre critics – Bernard Levin and Michael Billington – asking ‘does it make me too Harley Granville Rattigan for your colleagues?’20

  Robin Midgley’s production was not without its difficulties. The set, designed by Adrian Vaux, was required to serve many functions, and had become, by most accounts, over-elaborate and rather ugly. After Dorothy Tutin had disappeared from the picture, various actors were contemplated, including Joan Plowright, Rachel Roberts, Deborah Kerr. Eventually, and after Rattigan’s personal intercession, the part was offered to Glynis Johns, a charismatic film and stage actor who had recently starred in the musical A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the song ‘Send in the Clowns’ for her. But during previews at the Leicester Haymarket, Johns became ill and had to pull out from the show, to be replaced by Midgley’s partner Heather Sears, a stalwart of the Haymarket company. Charles Gray, who was playing O’Connor, had it in his contract that he was playing opposite Glynis Johns, so when she left, so did he. Rattigan had come to London for the production, his room being in the King Edward VI Hospital for Officers. He was only able to see one performance in Leicester, a painful journey by car up the motorway for a matinee, and another painful journey back down. The play was running rather long, at only ten minutes short of three hours, and some cuts were proposed. By the time it got to London, with Glynis Johns restored, but Charles Gray replaced by the veteran actor (and maverick documentary film-maker) Kenneth Griffith, the signs wer
e not auspicious.

  But the critics were largely favourable. Most of the reviews mention Rattigan’s ill-health, which had been widely reported, and there was undoubtedly a degree of generosity towards what all knew could be his last play. But also there is recognition in many reviews that perhaps they had been too quick to dismiss him and certainly there is unmistakeable admiration for the boldness of his new dramaturgical form. The play, wrote Bernard Levin, ‘betrays no sign of failing powers; on the contrary, it could almost herald a new direction for Sir Terence, and a most interesting direction, too.’ ‘I have never seen a piece that relied more on flashbacks,’ noted Irving Wardle, ‘nor one in which this often irritating device is more successful in advancing the action.’ Kenneth Griffith was universally admired, Michael Billington putting the point well: ‘Kenneth Griffith as Mrs Rattenbury’s counsel doesn’t so much return to the stage after a long absence as put in a takeover bid.’21 But the finest reviews were for Glynis Johns who ‘begins the evening in silk pyjamas bubbling with sensual invitation and gradually freezes into withdrawn and desperate silence’.22 According to playwright and critic Frank Marcus, ‘the actress takes no short cuts and her expense of energy is phenomenal’.23

  The praise was not unalloyed. The play was widely felt to have started rather unpromisingly and to have taken a long time to get going. The critics are divided on the Mrs Davenport story, with the Financial Times, New Statesmen and Sunday Times coming out against, and the Observer, The Times and Punch in favour. The set was not much admired. Despite all of Rattigan’s efforts, some critics insist on finding in it a ‘traditional West End play’ and Sheridan Morley even claimed that ‘Pinero would have understood Cause Célèbre […] so too would Galsworthy and Maugham.’24

  However, many critics detected more in this than a well-made courtroom drama. It expressed, said Billington, a ‘passionate hatred of English Puritanism and noble, unwavering affirmation of life’. John Barber noted it wasn’t an example of ‘smooth Terence Rattigan technique’, but was instead a much more raw play written with ‘understanding of sexual love [… and] profound pity for its victims’.25 Robert Cushman felt similarly: ‘Rattigan’s celebrated technical mastery usually leaves me cold; here it knocked me out. This is certainly the best of his recent plays; it may be the best of them all.’ The play ran more than respectably, clocking up 282 performances, more than any of his plays since Ross almost twenty years before.

  However, despite strenuous efforts by his agent, the play did not reach Broadway and indeed the play went largely unrevived for twenty years. In 1987, ITV broadcast a television adaptation of the play, starring Helen Mirren as Alma, David Morrissey as George, and David Suchet as O’Connor. It did not reflect particularly well on the play; Mirren gave a listless performance, lacking both passion and torment. David Morrissey was a little old for George, but charted a strong move from confusion to murderous jealousy. The adapter, Ken Taylor, dispensed entirely with Rattigan’s jurywoman subplot, reordered the story more conventionally, removed most of Rattigan’s dialogue and selection of events, and introduced his own material taken from the original trial.26

  In 1998, Neil Bartlett directed the first London revival of the play in twenty-one years. It was a production hard on the heels of the Almeida’s The Deep Blue Sea and Peter Hall’s Separate Tables, productions that marked a sustained revaluation of Terence Rattigan that has continued to this day. Bartlett, a gay theatre-maker with a particular interest in the sexual underground of mid-century theatre, was entirely in sympathy with Rattigan and thought that in Cause Célèbre ‘a dark, obsessive and potentially dangerous playwright emerges – one who used the niceties of the London stage as a Trojan Horse from which to savage the city’.27

  Two decades on, changes in stage technology and the greater familiarity of fluid epic staging meant that Bartlett’s production, ably supported by Rae Smith’s elegantly weightless design, captured, more surely than the original, the complexity of Rattigan’s ‘jump-cutting, split-timed, back-tracking, zigzagging experiment’.28 Finely cast, with Shakespearean actor Amanda Harris by turns poised, passionate and vulnerable as Alma, was balanced well by Diane Fletcher’s tight-lipped and anguished Edith. The play’s ferocious assault on conventional moral pieties was recognised by all, Georgina Brown noting that ‘Rattigan writes about women with astonishing perception and empathy’, and Billington finding in it ‘a fitting monument to a subversive theatrical career’. It was a production that rightly established it as one of Rattigan’s finest plays: as de Jongh put it, ‘one of the most astonishing theatrical swansongs of the English stage this century’.29

  In 2011, during Rattigan’s centenary celebrations, a major new production was mounted at the Old Vic Theatre, directed by Thea Sharrock, fresh from a huge success the previous year reviving After the Dance at the National Theatre, which pitted Anne-Marie Duff as Alma against Niamh Cusack as Edith.

  Cause Célèbre is a remarkable achievement, demonstrating Rattigan’s continuing theatrical vitality and willingness to experiment right to the last. What is most astonishing about it is the control with which he is able to deploy his complex and multilayered structure. We watch much of the first half through Edith Davenport’s eyes, the stage appearing to represent her own distorted perspective. After the argument with her son, she is left alone on stage, fulminating about ‘That… that… woman’. Immediately the stage is transformed into the frenzied crowd waiting to barrack Alma as she arrives at the Old Bailey (pp. 44–45). The second scene flows out of the first, in Neil Bartlett’s words, ‘as if in insane public amplification of her private emotion’.30

  In the second act, we are now seeing the world through Alma’s eyes; as we move fluently between her testimony in the witness box and flashback, it’s almost as if we’re experiencing the shattered confusions of her mind. Later, as the barristers sum up, a spotlight fixes on her face as we hear, flowing smoothly together, a series of speeches on all sides, united by cruel sexual contempt; the Judge’s words strike hammer-blows as, with Alma, we listen to him describe the jury’s most reasonable feelings towards her as ‘prejudice, dislike, disapproval, disgust’ (p. 99). As Alma is found not guilty, a curious stage direction reads ‘The court hears a storm of booing, hissing and shouts of ‘Shame!’ – but we do not hear it’ (p. 101). The contradiction is only apparent; the public galleries have erupted but we are now hearing these events through Alma’s numbed, disbelieving ears. And as the play moves into its final moments, the stories, the time structures are now overlaid entirely on one another: Edith, getting angrily drunk, occupies the same stage as Alma, beside the River Avon, preparing to take her own life; past and future entwine as we watch the Coroner read his report on the suicide that we are watching, and Edith’s horrified, ranting reaction – a final shout of rage at a moral world turned upside down – comes in direct response to Alma’s final act, the only time in the play when one woman responds directly to the other, though we also know they are days and miles apart.

  The moral disarray of the world is beautifully captured by Rattigan in a series of bold and witty theatrical juxtapositions. A society in which people have to hide their feelings, where they adopt poses of moral purity, is caught by a series of elaborate disguises: Alma and Joan have to arrive at court in one another’s clothes and get re-attired onstage; immediately this is slyly paralleled by a scene in the lawyer’s robing room, as the two courtroom opponents dress and discuss tactics. They even seem to adopt the identities of those they are defending: ‘I’d better warn you I intend to push your evil moral influence and your shameless depravity as hard as I can’, Casswell tells O’Connor, who retorts, ‘I’m going to push your psychopathological rages, your surliness and your fits of sudden violence’ (p. 48). It is a moment of high theatrical camp, but also part of the play’s theatrical depiction of the artifice and dishonesty of this world.

  Against that we have Alma, who is perhaps the simplest, most straightforward major character Rattigan ever created. Her a
nswers in the witness box hit a distinct note that we don’t hear anywhere else in the play – unadorned, artless honesty about sexual matters:

  O’CONNOR. Since that time you did not live together as husband and wife at all?

  ALMA. No.

  JUDGE. Mrs Rattenbury, you do understand what was meant by the question?

  ALMA. Yes.

  O’CONNOR. Did your husband have a separate room?

  ALMA. Yes.

  O’CONNOR. Was that at his suggestion or yours?

  ALMA. Oh, his.

  O’CONNOR. You would have been ready to continue marital relations with him?

  ALMA, Oh yes, of course. (p. 76)

  The lines are unremarkable, but they contrast very strikingly with the legal counsels’ rhetorical flights, and Davenport’s tangled, puritanical rages.

  Where Alma is artless, Rattigan is artful. The play tells an exciting story. One of the changes he has made to his source material is the way he theatricalises Alma’s decision to testify. The historical Alma Rattenbury decided to testify against George before the trial begins. Rattigan has her change her view in two theatrically compelling scenes; in the first, O’Connor confronts her with the consequences of shielding George by bringing in her young son. This horrifies Alma but she has not yet determined to change her mind: her final line of Act One – ‘Don’t think you’ve won, Mr O’Connor’ (p. 56) – is a powerful declaration of her principled stand and sets the tone for the second act. And then, in the strongest departure from the historical record, O’Connor calls Alma to the witness box, not knowing if she will agree to testify against George. It is an electrifying moment in the play, as Bernard Levin remarked of the premiere, both O’Connor’s victory and Alma’s defeat, her survival and her own death: ‘as the walls crumble about her, the play rises to the level of real tragedy, and the sense of waste is pressed home like a dagger’.31