It is hard not to read Alma’s final speech in the play as Rattigan’s farewell to the world. He has taken it very directly from Alma’s final letters. Compare Alma Rattenbury’s version:
Eight o’clock, and after so much walking I have got here […] And how singular I should have chosen the spot Stoner said he nearly jumped out of the train once at […] It is beautiful here. What a lovely world, really. It must be easier to be hanged than to do the job oneself, especially under the circumstances of being watched all the time. Pray God nothing stops me tonight… God bless my children and look after them […] One must be bold to do a thing like this. It is beautiful here, and I am alone. Thank God for peace at last.32
with Rattigan’s:
Eight o’clock. After so much running and walking I have got here. I should find myself just at this spot, where George and I once made love. It is beautiful here. What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it. It must be easier to be hanged than to have to do the job oneself. But that’s just my bad luck. Pray God nothing stops me. God bless my children and look after them. One has to be bold to do this thing. But it is beautiful here, and I am alone. Thank God for peace at last. (p. 107)
The speeches are very similar, but Rattigan’s edits and substitutions are very effective. The speech is simpler, more resigned. The place becomes not associated with threats of suicide, but of sex and love. And, in the middle of it, Alma’s ‘What a lovely world, really’ becomes Rattigan’s aching ‘What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it’, a line that we have heard, in variant forms, twice before in the play. As the darkness of the world closes around her, the line becomes ironic in its mismatch to the hatred we have seen, but it also stands defiantly as Rattigan’s utopian affirmation of the irreducibility of love.
Rattigan was taken by car on a tour of the West End where so many of his plays had enjoyed such famous successes, then he returned to Bermuda, where he contracted meningitis. Although he recovered, he was clearly very frail. On 30 November 1977, at midday, with a friend beside him and without fuss, he quietly died. The next night, at the end of the curtain call for Cause Célèbre, Glynis Johns stepped forward and asked the audience to join her in three cheers for the play’s author. ‘We decided against standing in silence,’ she explained. ‘He was, after all, a man who liked applause.’33
DAN REBELLATO
Notes
1. This account of the life and death of Francis and Alma Rattenbury is taken from three main sources: The Rt. Hon The Lord Havers, Peter Shankland, and Anthony Barrett’s The Rattenbury Case. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, David Napley’s Murder at the Villa Madeira. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988 and F. Tennyson Jesse’s. Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner. London: William Hodge, 1935, which is rather old but has the additional interest of being the source from which Rattigan took his information.
2. Jesse, op. cit., p. 3.
3. Havers, op. cit., p. 222.
4. Quoted in Geoffrey Wansell. Terence Rattigan: A Biography. London: Fourth Estate, 1995, p. 382.
5. Indeed the script remained unpublished and unproduced until 2011, when the Chichester Festival Theatre announced plans for Rattigan’s Nijinsky, an adaptation by Nicholas Wright, which blends together the unproduced script with the story of its non-production.
6. B. A. Young. The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986, pp. 195–6.
7. Terence Rattigan. Cause Célèbre. [radio script, 1975] Rattigan Papers: British Library. MSS. Add. 74510. p. 2.
8. Terence Rattigan. The Collected Plays: Volume Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, p. xii.
9. Jesse, op. cit., p. 4.
10. Wansell, op. cit., p. 391.
11. Rattigan. Cause Célèbre [radio script, 1975], op. cit., p. 83.
12. Ibid., p. 11. He has probably borrowed his opinion from F. Tennyson Jesse who describes her songs as ‘appalling… cheap little lyrics of the more obvious variety’ op. cit., p. 8.
13. Terence Rattigan. Cause Célèbre [1976 (listed as 1977, but I think it must be earlier)]. Rattigan Papers: British Library. MSS. Add. 74515. pp. 225–227.
14. See, for example, my introduction to The Deep Blue Sea. London: Nick Hern, 1999, p. xviii, to see how even his finest play had to pass through choppy and melodramatic waters.
15. Letter. Jan Van Loewen to Terence Rattigan. 20 July 1976. In: Cause Célèbre Correspondence. Rattigan Papers: British Library. MSS. Add. 74518.
16. Young, op. cit., p. 197.
17. Irving Wardle. ‘New life in courtroom drama’. Review. The Times. 5 July 1977. All reviews of 1977 production taken from Production File: Cause Célèbre, Her Majesty’s Theatre, July 1977. V&A Blythe House Archive.
18. Neil Bartlett. ‘Anarchy in the UK’ Cause Célèbre: Programme. Lyric Hammersmith, 1998.
19. Rattigan. Cause Célèbre [radio script, 1975], op. cit., p. 1.
20. Draft of [telegram] to Bernard Levin. Sent 9 March [1977]. In: Cause Célèbre Correspondence. Rattigan Papers: British Library. MSS. Add. 74518. Harley Granville Barker was a leading exponent of the Edwardian well-made play. (In his letter to Billington, in the same file and sent the same day, he adds ‘Of course bestest title would be Crime and Punishment only some Russian blighter seems to have got there first.’)
21. Bernard Levin. ‘Rattigan’s act of defiance’. Review. Sunday Times. 10 July 1977; Wardle, op. cit.; Michael Billington. Review. Guardian. 5 July 1977.
22. Wardle, op. cit.
23. Frank Marcus. ‘The Master of Flaws’. Sunday Telegraph. [10 July 1977].
24. Robert Cushman. ‘Loose lady in the dock’. Review. Observer. 10 July 1977. p. 26; Sheridan Morley. ‘The Master Builder.’ Review. Punch. 13 July 1977. p. 85.
25. John Barber. ‘Profound study of woman in torment’. Review. Daily Telegraph. 5 July 1977.
26. Cause Célèbre. Dir. John Gorrie. (ITV, 1987). Network DVD, 2010.
27. Bartlett, op. cit.
28. Nicholas de Jongh. Evening Standard. 11 February 1998. All reviews of this production taken from Theatre Record, 18.3 (2 March), pp. 140–146.
29. Georgina Brown. Mail on Sunday. 15 February 1998; Michael Billington. The Guardian. 11 February 1998.
30. Bartlett, op. cit.
31. Levin, op. cit.
32. Havers, Shankland and Barrett, op. cit., p. 219.
33. ‘Cause to applaud’. Daily Telegraph. 2 December 1977.
CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
Cause Célèbre was first performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, on 4 July 1977, presented by John Gale. The cast was as follows:
ALMA RATTENBURY
Glynis Johns
FRANCIS RATTENBURY
Anthony Pedley
CHRISTOPHER
Matthew Ryan /
Douglas Melbourne
IRENE RIGGS
Sheila Grant
GEORGE WOOD
Neil Daglish
EDITH DAVENPORT
Helen Lindsay
JOHN DAVENPORT
Jeremy Hawk
TONY DAVENPORT
Adam Richardson
STELLA MORRISON
Angela Browne
RANDOLPH BROWNE
Kevin Hart
JUDGE
Patrick Barr
O’CONNOR
Kenneth Griffith
CROOM-JOHNSON
Bernard Archard
CASSWELL
Darryl Forbes-Dawson
MONTAGU
Philip Bowen
CLERK OF THE COURT
David Glover
JOAN WEBSTER
Peggy Aitchison
SERGEANT BAGWELL
Anthony Pedley
PORTER
Anthony Howard
WARDER
David Masterman
CORONER
David Glover
Director
Robin Midgley
De
signer
Adrian Vaux
Cause Célèbre was performed as part of the Rattigan Centenary celebrations at The Old Vic, London, from 17 March–11 June 2011. The cast (in order of appearance) was as follows:
ALMA RATTENBURY
Anne-Marie Duff
EDITH DAVENPORT
Niamh Cusack
STELLA MORRISON
Lucy Robinson
JOHN DAVENPORT
Simon Chandler
TONY DAVENPORT
Freddie Fox
PORTER
Tristram Wymark
GEORGE WOOD
Tommy McDonnell
IRENE RIGGS
Jenny Galloway
FRANCIS RATTENBURY
Timothy Carlton
CHRISTOPHER
Oliver Coopersmith
RANDOLPH BROWNE
Rory Fleck-Byrne
JOAN WEBSTER
Lucy Black
O’CONNOR
Nicholas Jones
MONTAGU
Rory Fleck-Byrne
CASSWELL
Richard Teverson
WARDER
Sarah Waddell
CLERK OF THE COURT
Tristan Shepherd
JUDGE
Patrick Godfrey
CROOM-JOHNSON
Richard Clifford
SERGEANT BAGWELL
Michael Webber
CORONER
Tristram Wymark
Director
Thea Sharrock
Designer
Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting
Bruno Poet
Music
Adrian Johnston
Sound
Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Casting
Sarah Bird
Characters
ALMA RATTENBURY
FRANCIS RATTENBURY
CHRISTOPHER
IRENE RIGGS
GEORGE WOOD
EDITH DAVENPORT
JOHN DAVENPORT
TONY DAVENPORT
STELLA MORRISON
RANDOLPH BROWNE
JUDGE
O’CONNOR
CROOM-JOHNSON
CASSWELL
MONTAGU
CLERK OF THE COURT
JOAN WEBSTER
POLICE SERGEANT BAGWELL
PORTER
WARDER
CORONER
The action of the play takes place in Bournemouth and London in 1934 and 1935.
This play was inspired by the facts of a well-known case, but the characters attributed to the individuals represented are based on the author’s imagination, and are not necessarily factual.
ACT ONE
The stage represents at various times Court Number One at the Old Bailey and other parts of the Central Criminal Court in London, a villa at Bournemouth, the drawing room of a flat in Kensington and other places. Changes of scene are effected mainly by lighting, the curtain falling only at the end of each of the two acts.
Lights on ALMA RATTENBURY and MRS EDITH DAVENPORT. After a moment, light comes up very dimly on the CLERK OF THE COURT.
CLERK OF THE COURT. Alma Victoria Rattenbury, you are charged with the murder of Francis Mawson Rattenbury on March the twenty-eighth, 1935. Are you guilty or not guilty?
ALMA (almost inaudibly). Not guilty.
The lights change as the CLERK OF THE COURT turns towards MRS DAVENPORT.
CLERK OF THE COURT. Edith Amelia Davenport, take the book in your right hand and read what is on this card.
The light on the CLERK OF THE COURT slowly fades out.
MRS DAVENPORT. I do solemnly swear by Almighty God that I will well and truly try the issues joined between our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoners at the bar and will give a true verdict according to the evidence.
The spots fade out on ALMA and MRS DAVENPORT.
MRS DAVENPORT and STELLA MORRISON in the sitting room of the flat in Kensington. STELLA is MRS DAVENPORT’s sister, a year or two younger.
STELLA. A jury summons! – My dear, how too frightful. Let’s see.
MRS DAVENPORT hands her the official letter.
(Reading.) ‘… present yourself at the… jury service… for fifteen days… and fail not at your peril’ – indeed!
MRS DAVENPORT (smiling). Yes, rather scaring, that. Peril of what, d’you think? Hard labour, or the stocks, or just a ducking?
STELLA. Whopping great fine, I should think. Might almost be worth paying it. I’ll get Henry to cough up the necessary if you like.
MRS DAVENPORT (taking back the letter). Certainly not. I’m quite looking forward to it, as it happens.
STELLA. What, a whole fortnight?
MRS DAVENPORT. Well, I’ve got the time these days, and who knows, I might do a bit of good for some old soul who’s snitched a pair of silk stockings from Barkers.
STELLA. More likely to be indecent exposure.
MRS DAVENPORT. Oh, they wouldn’t have women on those juries, would they?
STELLA. My dear, they have women on everything these days.
MRS DAVENPORT. Well, if it is that, I’ll just have to face it like – well, like a man, I suppose. But I’m not going on that date – I’m not going to mess up Tony’s Christmas hols. I’ll ask for a postponement to May, that should be safe.
STELLA. Is he enjoying himself in Cannes?
MRS DAVENPORT. Tony? He says so in his postcards, but I expect they’re written under John’s supervision. Thank heavens it’s the last time.
STELLA. You’re still determined on the divorce?
MRS DAVENPORT. Yes. Quite.
STELLA. Well, you know what I think.
MRS DAVENPORT. A separation doesn’t give me custody.
STELLA. You won’t get complete custody.
MRS DAVENPORT. Oh yes I will. John won’t defend it. He’s too scared of his undersecretary. It’ll all be fixed out of court. If he does defend it, I’ll win.
STELLA. There was only that one woman, wasn’t there?
MRS DAVENPORT. Oh no. In the five years before we separated I’ve found out now there were at least two others. And now there’s this dreadful woman.
STELLA. Still, four in five years? That doesn’t really make him Bluebeard, you know. In fact, for most husbands with unwilling wives I’d say it was about par for the course.
MRS DAVENPORT. Are you trying to make it my fault again?
STELLA. Well, he was only about forty, wasn’t he, when you started having headaches? That is a bit young, darling, for a husband to find himself in the spare room.
MRS DAVENPORT. I couldn’t go on, Stella. I told you. I never did care much for that side of things, as you know, and as he got older he got more and more demanding.
STELLA. That’s one thing I could never say about Henry –
MRS DAVENPORT. He used to say that my reluctance made him want it more. Now, you can’t say that’s normal, Stella.
STELLA. I suppose not – I just wonder if it would work with Henry… How does Tony feel about it all? He always seemed to be quite fond of his father.
MRS DAVENPORT. Well, he was. Of course, now that I’ve told him the truth – not all of it, of course, just enough – he’s beginning to see things my way. Unless he’s been led astray these last two weeks. I wouldn’t put anything past that man. I really hate him.
Fade out.
DAVENPORT. There should be a car waiting to pick me up. The name’s Davenport – would you put that one down there and come back for the other?
PORTER. Very good, sir! (Goes.)
DAVENPORT. Well, Tony, I’m afraid this is goodbye. You had better take the airport bus to Victoria Air Terminus, and get a taxi to Kensington from there… I’m going straight to the Home Office, so –
TONY (quickly). I understand. (Pause.) Dad, I will be seeing you again, won’t I?
DAVENPORT. Well, certainly in court.
TONY. I meant after that?
DAVENPORT. I’m afraid that depends
on your mother.
TONY. I see. Can I ask one thing?
DAVENPORT. Yes.
TONY. Mum always talks to me – well, sometimes talks to me about that woman, et cetera, et cetera!
DAVENPORT. Yes.
TONY. Well – there isn’t any that woman, is there? I mean, I’ve been with you two weeks, and I’m not half-witted…
DAVENPORT. No, you’re not.
TONY. You still love Mum, don’t you?
DAVENPORT. Yes, I do.
TONY. Dad – is there any that woman?
Pause.
PORTER. I’ve found your car, sir; do you want the other one in the boot?
DAVENPORT. No, my son is travelling by the bus, so –
PORTER. Yes, sir. I’ll get him a place.
TONY. Thank you.
DAVENPORT. I’ll do the VIP. Well, goodbye, Tony.
TONY. Thank you for a marvellous time.
DAVENPORT. A bit dull, I’m afraid.
TONY. Not Cannes. That was smashing.
DAVENPORT. You didn’t like Paris?
TONY. Well, don’t think I’m ungrateful, Dad, but you did promise to take me a – to a – you know – that ‘House of All Nations’ –
DAVENPORT. Tony, I did remember that. It’s just that – well, you have to take a passport, you see.
TONY. A passport to a brothel?
DAVENPORT. They’re very strict about underage.
TONY (despairing). Oh, Dad! Even in France? I’ll have to try – Turkey or somewhere.
Cause Célèbre Page 5
