Who is Sylvia? and Duologue

by Terence Rattigan

  But while it is true that the play becomes lighter in the rewriting, the move is not away from seriousness, but from realism. The first signal of this is the indication that the three young women to whom Mark is attracted are all played by the same actress. It gives the action of the play a hallucinatory quality that allows us access to Mark’s subjectivity, invites us to share in his view of the world. Glen Byam Shaw, who Rattigan had asked to consider directing the play, declined the offer, and his reasons for doing so are telling: ‘I should tend to give it a reality which you have so cleverly realised in the writing would be wrong. When you pointed out to me your reason for having the three parts played by one girl it said to me what I had tried to say to you but not been able to explain in definite terms.’24

  The structure of the play is unusual in its rather formal triptych. We are given three snapshots of Mark’s life and we are, for the most part, required to infer what has taken place between the acts. Some of the play’s first critics found the play’s structure rather repetitive, but with hindsight, after the similar and deliberate repetitions of plays like Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, this may be one of the play’s principal points of interest. It conveys both the obsessiveness of Mark’s behaviour and also its pointlessness. His unconscious feelings generate a kind of stammering repetition of the original desire. In addition, the play’s time-jumps mark it out as ahead of its time. There had been plays that leapt vigorously across the decades – J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways (1937) or George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh (1922), for example – but the device was far less common than it is now. The separate periods emphasise the isolation of each act and, through the vivid recreation of each era’s slang and cultural references, adds a sense of sparkling artifice that further takes us into Mark’s head.25

  Rattigan finished the second draft of his play in January 1950 and sent it to ‘Binkie’ Beaumont of H.M. Tennent, who had produced several of his comedies before, and also to his agent of almost twenty years, A.D. Peters. Beaumont was enthusiastic about the play and immediately began to put together the production team. To direct, they approached Anthony Quayle, best known for his work with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (later to become the Royal Shakespeare Company), another sign that Rattigan saw this fundamentally as a serious comedy.

  Peters met Terry to discuss the play and was less than enthusiastic. Indeed, his criticisms were so fundamental that there seemed to be little of the play that was salvageable. When Rattigan tried to defend it, Peters is thought to have remarked rather drily that he thought it would be an ‘extremely interesting first night’, with the implication that his criticisms of the play would be vindicated. This enraged Rattigan, who wrote to him a couple of days later and sacked him as his agent for this play. He did so with immaculate politeness: ‘Your criticisms were welcome – as all considered criticisms are at this stage – and their forthrightness is appreciated, but if I were to act on them I would, it seems to me, either have to rewrite the play entirely with a new construction or, let’s face it, tear it up and forget about it.’26 Instead, he would let his US agent, Harold Freedman, represent the play in both the UK and the US. Peters was horrified – ‘Your letter gave me one of the biggest shocks I have ever had’ – and begged him to reconsider, insisting that, as an agent, he felt he had a duty to offer constructive criticism, awkward though that may be: ‘It is always a difficult and painful thing to criticise an author’s work adversely,’ he explained. ‘It is like telling a mother that her newborn baby squints.’27 Rattigan was unmoved, replying that ‘you have left me in no doubt whatever that you have no basic faith in the play as it stood’, and drew particular attention to his comment about the first-night audience, ‘hardly a remark calculated to imbue an author – nervous at the best of times – with great confidence.’28 This was the beginning of the end for their professional relationship. Rattigan would continue to work closely with Freedman and eventually abandoned A.D. Peters for Jan Van Loewen’s agency instead.

  Was it just this casual and thoughtless remark that caused the rift? It seems unlikely. As Peters bitterly – but rightly – remarked in a later letter to Terry, ‘if your views are carried to their logical conclusion, agents will become mere yes-men, and every manuscript they receive will be a flawless masterpiece. Perhaps that is what agents ought to be. It would certainly make life easier for them.’29 Rattigan could be thin-skinned but, even by his standards, this would have been a considerable overreaction. In fact, as he explained in a letter to Harold Freedman, he had reason to doubt Peters’ professionalism. Another of his clients was J.B. Priestley, and the producer Stephen Phillips had been considering a new comedy by him. When he came to discuss the production with the agent, Peters had reputedly said the play was ‘one of the worst plays Priestley had ever written and “was embarrassingly unfunny”.’ Word of this had come to Rattigan, who concluded that Peters ‘would be entirely unable to conceal his true opinion of [Who is Sylvia?] professionally, even if he tried – which, in view of Stephen’s story – seems unlikely.’ In addition, Rattigan insisted, his smug prediction of a frosty first night was ‘unforgivable’: ‘He intended, apparently, to wait happily and complacently with folded arms for the audience’s verdict which, if favourable, would make him money, and, if unfavourable, would give him a splendid chance of saying “I told you so”. Binkie and I and the rest of us have all the work, heartache and worries. Peters collects the plums. Over my dead body.’30

  Harold Freedman, in fact, was not without criticisms of the play himself. In a lengthy letter to Rattigan, he urged the playwright to rewrite the play, making it more serious: ‘I am just wondering whether or not that in getting away from the heavy treatment you told me you had started the play out with, you have finally landed on too light a treatment for it.’ He felt in particular that the Sylvia theme should be emphasised more strongly and argued that for Mark’s wife Caroline to reveal she has known about Sylvia all along lets Mark off the hook of having to face up to his emotional immaturity.31 Of course, Rattigan had already attempted to write this more serious play and did not want to go back to it, but promised to emphasise Sylvia’s will-o’-the-wisp presence in the play and give Mark a more active role in the denouement.

  Behind Freedman’s remarks stood the figure of Rex Harrison. Mark St Neots is a difficult role, requiring an actor charismatic enough to seduce the audience from their moral doubts, quickwitted enough to play the comedy, and sophisticated enough to find the complexity in this man’s failed thirty-three-year journey to recover his lost love. To author, agent and producer, Rex Harrison was the perfect choice. A suave, attractive, magnetic figure, he was both a leading man and excellent comic actor; his first big break was, in fact, in the first production of French Without Tears. In playing Mark he would also have had the advantage of being able to draw on his own considerable experience as an impenitent philanderer. Freedman’s suggestions about the conclusion derived from Rex’s view that ‘when you get to the end of the play all he had to do was groan at Caroline’s pointing this out to him and that out to him.’32

  Rex Harrison repeated these concerns in a long letter to Rattigan a week later. His criticisms are threefold: he is unhappy that Caroline gets the best of the last act; he is also anxious that Denis gets the best of the second; and finally, he expresses some anxiety that Mark would fall for ‘these giggly girls’. For a ‘cultured, witty, man of the world’ to fall in love with a ‘silly, very common shop girl […] gold-digging Nora [and] mannequin and Mum’s best friend Doris’ risked making him look ‘foolish’.33

  Fairly obviously, these criticisms are a mixture of snobbery and actor’s vanity, Harrison not wanting to compromise his suave star persona, nor to be upstaged by his co-stars. But he was a big star and his presence would guarantee a Broadway run of the play, so Rattigan responded at considerable length, setting out ‘the ideas I had intended to underlie the play’ so that they could both judge whether the ideas are wrong or the play has
not brought them out sufficiently. As a result, we have a second substantial exposition of Rattigan’s thinking on Who is Sylvia?

  He begins by explaining that Sylvia is a fantasy and diagnoses Mark as:

  a fairly straightforward Oedipus subject in love with the mother image which he neatly divides into two halves, the upper half being represented by his wife and the lower half by his successive Sylvias. His conscious mind is acutely aware of the fact that the lower half of this image must never dominate the upper and he arranges his life accordingly.

  In other words, his erotic life is sharply divided and ‘it is to safeguard his marital life that he takes on extra-marital relationships’. And since he is trying not to harm his marriage but – on some level, anyway – to protect it, ‘he deliberately chooses his extra-marital relationships from among those girls who could never menace his relationship with Caroline.’ And this allows him, for most of the play, to have the best of both worlds. ‘Mark has a wife and son who he adores and who adore him and a long series of pleasant, if rather vague, romantic memories. He has had his cake and eaten it. Oscar has only had his cake and at the end of his life is feeling very hungry – poor old man.’ He admits that ‘this is the basis of a far more serious play than I have written’, but emphasises that it is not intended to be a frivolous play but more of a fantasy. Referring to the idea of having one actress play the three ‘Sylvias’, he notes that ‘it introduces the note of fantasy which, I think, will be vastly important to the play and will, also I am sure, give an audience a very good clue to the secret of Mark’s psychology’. As for Rex’s worries about being upstaged by his son and wife, he tries to be reassuring: ‘the comedy, I am sure, consists in his discomfiture – you know how sadistic audiences are – and in his enforced abandonment of paternal dignity.’34 Again, the picture Rattigan paints of his play is of a serious piece of work.

  Rattigan’s wooing of Rex Harrison was not ultimately successful. In his first letter, Harold Freedman admitted to doubts that Rex would take the part and a few days later cabled to warn that Harrison was being talked about in connection with a musical adaptation of Anna and the King of Siam, the film in which Rex Harrison had starred in 1946.35 He recommended approaching other actors, but Rattigan was reluctant: he knew Rex would be right for the part and would certainly be affronted to know that other actors were being talked to about the role. Rex, for his part, cabled in early March to confirm his interest. Rattigan clumsily attempted to turn this into a firm commitment, a trap from which Rex nimbly escaped, explaining that he only meant he’d tell Terry if he decided to take on something else. He nonetheless insisted that he wanted to do the part and begged Rattigan to keep the part for him. ‘Will bear with you till kingdom come,’ cabled Rattigan in reply, ‘or more specifically about middle April.’ These hopes were dashed at the end of the month, when Harrison’s wife, Lilli Palmer, was cast in John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle in the autumn, when Harrison would have had to be away playing Mark St Neots, and so he turned the part down.36

  Casting the lead role continued to elude the production team. Rattigan was keen on Michael Wilding, who had been a big success in While the Sun Shines but was now a big star in British films and regretfully had to turn the part down, returning, by post, ‘your beautiful play & some pieces of my broken heart’.37 David Niven was unavailable and John Mills also declined (‘I have always wanted to do a play of yours and I absolutely hate having to say that I don’t think this one is quite my cup of tea’).38 Michael Redgrave was apparently ‘madly keen’39 to play it, but his career in films was taking off and negotiating his time would have meant more delays. Robert Flemyng, on the other hand, was interested and his dates worked out. But Rattigan hesitated for five days. Why the delay? Rattigan knew Flemyng well; he was another alumnus of the first French Without Tears cast, but was he perhaps too light? Was he charismatic enough? Having been searching for his Mark since late January, however, Rattigan was getting concerned that the part could ever be cast and so cabled his old friend to offer him the role.

  In the event, Bobby Flemyng had spoken to his old castmate, Rex Harrison, and shared his views of some of the play’s shortcomings. Although he was less concerned about being upstaged by Caroline and Denis, he, too, felt that Mark needed to have more sophisticated tastes in women:

  We must see a little more of the man who is capable of being an ambassador – and what is more a brilliant one in one of the key appointments. You see it’s only too easy for the soldier type, who is brilliant, and spends his spare time successfully fucking without any amorous entanglements – I knew quite a few in me [sic] time in the service. But Mark is quite another cup of tea.

  Conspiratorially, he added:

  We don’t have to tell each other, dear, that for numbers of our intelligence deception in the matter of romance is always disaster – in other words that we soon know when a lovely face is a bore, and not the romance we were rather hoping it would be.40

  Rattigan’s reply is not recorded but, in any event, he did not adjust his Sylvias.

  With the lead actor in place, it became easier to start casting the other roles. For the brief role of Caroline, they asked the greatest stage comedienne of the day, Athene Seyler, who responded with enthusiasm: ‘this is brilliant stuff real high comedy I’d love to do that charming five minutes.’41 Esmond Knight – after cavilling at the size of the role – agreed to play Williams.42 Roland Culver – yet another member of the first French Without Tears cast – was hired to play Oscar. Indeed, French Without Tears cast a long shadow over Who is Sylvia?, not least after the decision was made to produce the show in the Criterion Theatre, where the earlier play had been such a success. Rattigan thought this a good idea, cabling that it offered a ‘small gross but excellent atmosphere and tradition for light comedy thus obviating necessity excusing lightness of play pre-production publicity’.43 And when Mark explains that his son has been ‘at this place in Tours for three months and he can’t even write a line of a letter in reasonably correct French. Keeps complaining that the daughter of the house has fallen in love with him’ (p. 51), he is neatly recapitulating the plot of French Without Tears, an echo that would have been amplified in the Criterion’s auditorium.

  The decision to play the Criterion seems to be part of a shift in Rattigan’s attitude, no longer defending the elements of emotional fantasy in his play, instead capitulating to those around him who preferred to see Who is Sylvia? as a light comedy. This is how the theatre programme billed the play and Rattigan himself told a journalist on the eve of its London opening, ‘This tonight is only a little comedy – light, unemotional. Frankly, I planned it as a serious play. It just turned into a frivolity.’44

  The play had a short pre-London tour, opening at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, moving to Brighton, and thence to London. The production was not happy. Rattigan had complained to some friends that Robert Flemyng was playing it too ponderously – his friend Juliet Duff wrote to suggest that ‘if poor Mr F. persists in playing it like Ibsen [, Noël Coward] would be superb in the part, and give it just the careless gaiety that it needs’45 – but cabled Harold Freedman after press night to blame ‘Flemyng’s inability to bring out the various relationships in the play notably with Oscar thus making their scenes together more like backchat between comedians than conversation between very close friends’.46 Flemyng, meanwhile, was unhappy about the performance of Diane Hart, playing all the Sylvias, and wrote to Rattigan that he was privately re-rehearsing her and wanted Terry to drop in to watch Tony Quayle redirect the first scene.47 Rattigan’s secretary, Mary Herring, watched the dress rehearsal and reported, ‘It was dreadful, they were all as flat as pancakes.’ Terry toyed with bringing in Nigel Patrick as a last-minute replacement for Flemyng.48

  Regional critics were sometimes positive, the reviewer in the Cambridge Daily News praising ‘the great art of this superb dramatist wedded to some of the most polished acting ever seen on a stage long famous for outstanding performance
s’.49 The dominant tone is confusion; some found the play too long, others too light. These confusions deepened when the play opened in London. If the reviewers saw it as a light comedy, they found it neither light nor comic enough. If they believed it to be a serious play, they lamented that the play was insufficiently serious. Speaking up for the latter tendency, The Times declared that ‘the first act is scattered with what seem to be the bits and pieces of a serious intention’ but wishes ‘this theme were treated seriously’.50 Meanwhile, the headline of Cecil Wilson’s review in the Daily Mail summarised the former view: ‘Too Many Titters, Not Enough Laughs’. It is clear that the critics did not know what to make of this play, which did not fit into any known genre. Beverly Baxter makes this clear in the Evening Standard: ‘If we are to have sin, and there is a place for sin in the theatre, it should be either tragic or amusing. Mr Rattigan’s sinners are neither.’51

  Most perceptive was Alan Dent’s review which noted, as no other critic seemed to, that it is the combination of melancholy and laughter that is distinctive and original about the play:

  Terence Rattigan’s new play calls itself ‘A light comedy’ in the programme. Yet it is continuously concerned with that bitterest thing in life’s comedy, the loss of illusion with the approach of age […] Mr Rattigan’s touch stays remarkably light, though his subject is here and there genuinely and intractably serious and not really the stuff of frivolous comedy […] This is a comedy which keeps us sadly smiling most of the time rather than in continuous laughter.52