Separate Tables

by Terence Rattigan

  In this context, it becomes clear that much of the action of the play is metonymic of wider social conflicts. The campaign against ‘vice’ found its first major victim in October 1953, when the recently-knighted John Gielgud was arrested for importuning. About to make his first stage entrance after the arrest, he was reportedly paralysed with fear in the wings, until his co-star, Sybil Thorndike, came and pulled him out onto the stage, whereupon he was greeted with a standing ovation. The story of Major Pollock’s arrest and of the support he finally wins from the residents was certainly inspired by the hounding and vindication of Rattigan’s old friend. Naming Pollock’s closest friend ‘Sibyl’ is almost certainly a discreet tribute to Thorndike’s loyalty.12

  Seen in historical context, the residents’ gossip and tittle-tattle have therefore a harder edge. The Beauregard’s status as a place of refuge is challenged by Mrs Railton-Bell’s determination to bring the dominant moral evangelism of the outside world into the heart of the hotel. The kangaroo court that she peremptorily convenes to try David Pollock in his absence is explicitly compared by Charles to McCarthyism and Fascism. Mrs Railton-Bell says of Charles and Jean ‘If they’re in love, why don’t they say so? I hate anything furtive’ (p. 25), which is echoed by Charles in the debate about Pollock’s crime, when he declares that he’s ‘always had an intense dislike of the more furtive forms of sexual expression’ (p. 86). The obsession with bringing homosexuality out into the open was motivated by a desire to bring it under social control, though in the hands of certain MPs and the Wolfenden Committee (established in August 1954 to examine the law relating to sexual offences) it was often cloaked in the guise of liberalism. It is striking that this last declaration is spoken by the most liberal character in the play.13

  But it is even more striking that Mrs Railton-Bell cloaks her own despotic prurience in the guise of solid civic virtue. Once she has forced the other residents to agree to Pollock’s expulsion, she contemplates Charles’s more sympathetic response to his predicament: ‘what I say is—we’re all of us entitled to our own opinions,’ she announces open-mindedly, before adding darkly, ‘however odd and dangerous and distasteful they may sometimes be’. And as she gleefully sets off to tell Miss Cooper of the residents’ decision she adds gravely, ‘I hope you all understand it’s a duty I hardly relish’ (p. 93). The preposterous hypocrisy of such statements is made clear by Rattigan’s subtle, ironic interventions, especially in the final scene in the dining room, where Mrs Railton-Bell, apparently fatigued by the demands of good citizenship, declares: ‘what a really nerve-racking day it’s been hasn’t it? I don’t suppose any of us will ever forget it. Ever. I feel utterly shattered, myself. (To SIBYL.) Pass the sauce, dear’ (p. 108), the incongruity of the final line wittily giving the lie to the rest. More cruelly, Mrs Railton-Bell takes great delight in telling Sibyl about Pollock’s arrest, while contriving to ensure that it all appears to have been dragged unwillingly from her (‘She insisted. She absolutely insisted’ p. 83).

  Nonetheless, some critics have claimed that, in not directly addressing homosexuality in this play and others, Rattigan ‘funked it’.14 His fear of letting his mother find out about his sexuality conspired to make him write a play which timidly avoided naming its real subject. However, to say this is to make precisely the same demands of Separate Tables that Mrs Railton-Bell makes of Mr Pollock. It is an approach to representation which will be satisfied with nothing but bringing homosexuality out into the open. The fact is that the play works in precisely the unsettling, subversive way that homosexuality operated in the 1950s; it hints at its subject matter, but makes it almost impossible to identify this subject clearly. In his biography of Rattigan, B. A. Young notes that the real subject of the play would have been clear to those members of the audience who wished to know.15 Rattigan himself believed that most of them realised that the Major’s actual crime was ‘symbolical of another problem of which, at that time (just after several prominent cases), they were most sensitively conscious’.16 Kenneth Tynan’s review archly alludes to this double level of meaning when he has his ‘Young Perfectionist’ admit, ‘I regretted that the major’s crime was not something more cathartic than mere cinema flirtation. Yet I suppose the play is as good a handling of sexual abnormality as English playgoers will tolerate’.17

  The Lord Chamberlain, in any case, would hardly have permitted a play which represented a homosexual on stage, let alone one which asked for tolerance and understanding.18 Rattigan recognised this, explaining the mechanism of his play as a way round the censor’s Panoptical scrutiny: ‘I had in fact appealed over the head of the Lord Chamberlain to the sensibilities and particular awareness of an English audience. I was in fact saying to them, “Look, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Lord Chamberlain has forced me into an evasion, but you and I will foil him. Everybody in the play is going to behave as if there were no evasion at all and as if the more important and serious theme were still the issue”’.19

  Which is precisely what the play does. Much of the dialogue seems far less relevant to Pollock’s apparent crime than to a homosexual offence. When Jean bursts out in condemnation, Charles retorts, ‘your vehemence is highly suspect. I must have you psychoanalysed’ (p. 87), a clear reference to the then standard psychoanalytic belief that a person’s extreme hostility to homosexuality could be traced to their own insufficiently repressed homosexual tendencies. The psychoanalytic model was for many people—including Rattigan—part of the ‘common sense’ understanding of homosexuality; one of its central beliefs was to explain homosexuality as a failure psychically to grow up, the dreadful result of a distant father and a dominant mother. This explains the bond between Sibyl and Pollock. With her dead father, dominating mother, and consequent infantilism, and his unusual sexual proclivities, homosexuality emerges associatively in the link between them. And Pollock’s speech about having had to invent another personality is much more clearly pertinent to homosexual experience than it is to groping women in the dark.20

  Understood in this way, the play can not only be interpreted as covertly ‘about’ homosexuality, but also as a play firmly resistant to the campaign to control it. In the face of crusades to open up homosexuality to public scrutiny, thereby removing its subversive ability to infiltrate and undermine the conventional pieties of sexual normality, the play’s insistence on silence and calm is paradoxically radical. And the play does not isolate David Pollock; in fact, Rattigan carefully uses the other stories in the hotel to parallel and echo his predicament. Miss Cooper hides her relationship with John Malcolm, who himself has changed his name, and invented a further nom de plume for his political journalism. Charles and Jean studiously pretend to be friends and not lovers, even telling Charles’s father a ‘dirty lie’ to make their relationship appear more respectable (p. 22); they also invent names for the other characters: Miss Meacham is ‘Dream Girl’, Mrs Railton-Bell ‘Bournemouth Belle’, Lady Matheson ‘Minnie Mouse’, John Malcolm ‘Karl Marx’ and Mr Fowler ‘Mr Chips’ (p. 21). This recognition that all of the characters have created personalities and roles for themselves echoes Pollock’s adoption of pretended military rank and education. Even Mrs Railton-Bell’s seizure of the moral high ground is ironically deflated by Charles with the words, ‘Good God! What a performance’ (p. 85). There is also a faint suggestion of homoeroticism in Mr Fowler’s disappointed longing for his former pupils. After the bruising show-trial of Pollock, the residents decide to take their mind off things by going to watch Philip Harben’s television cookery programme; as he leaves, Mr Fowler tries to illuminate the show’s appeal: ‘One suffers the tortures of Tantalus, and yet the pleasure is intense. Isn’t that what is today called masochism?’ (p. 94). It seems that perversity is not merely confined to Bournemouth’s cinemas.

  Rattigan’s exquisite stagecraft turns the dynamics of the play slowly but surely against Mrs Railton-Bell. Her insistence on training the moral spotlight on ‘Major’ Pollock, is subtly undermined, preparing us for her final defeat i
n the last scene. The first play begins with her failed attempts to strike up conversation. Her imperious efforts to determine the truth about pastry, betting and spiritualism are comically undermined by the unflappably eccentric Miss Meacham. Later, having foundered in her bid to correct John Malcolm on the rights and wrongs of socialism, the attempted magnificence of her theatrical exit is ruined, with Chekhovian bathos, by Lady Matheson’s misplacement of her glasses (p. 29). She appears to fare better in the Pollock affair, yet Rattigan adroitly situates the audience at a distance from her; we are alerted to the presence of something in the local newspaper by Pollock’s frantic attempt to remove all copies from the lounge, but he is foiled by Mrs Railton-Bell, whom we watch reading the newspaper: ‘we do not see her face but the paper itself begins to shake slightly as she reads’ (p. 77). The audience is informed of the report’s contents when Lady Matheson reads it aloud; the effect is that when Mrs Railton-Bell makes her dramatic announcement to the residents, we already know the content and our focus is not on what is said, but how it is said. By separating our moment of revelation from that of the residents, Rattigan allows us critically to observe the mechanisms used to incite Pollock’s removal from the hotel, to train the moral spotlight on the accuser rather than the accused.

  But it is the final scene which most powerfully brings about Mrs Railton-Bell’s downfall. The scene opens with the residents at dinner; Pollock appears to have left, his table is unlaid, and the 1950s strategy of controlling by making visible appears to have been effected. So, when he appears to take his usual table, it is a thrilling theatrical reversal.

  Characteristically, the battle which commences is not verbally acknowledged by a single character, but is conducted with the weapons of the gaze; at a time when the ability of the straight world to control sexual deviancy through gazing fearlessly upon it was of widespread concern, this has a particular metaphorical force. When Pollock first appears, he cannot look anyone in the eye and he stares at the table cloth. Mrs Railton-Bell, on the other hand, ‘is glaring furiously at him’. When Charles breaks the silence to address him, she turns ‘fully round in her chair in an attempt to paralyse him into silence’, and she is joined by Jean who is ‘furiously glaring at her husband’ (p. 109). When this appears to fail Mrs Railton-Bell decides to snub him by claiming to feel a imaginary draft and turning her chair so she has her back to him. This leaves her ill-prepared for Mr Fowler’s move, as he interrupts his departure from the dining room to take a step back and acknowledge Mr Pollock. As a result, Mrs Railton-Bell is forced to ‘twist her head sharply round in order to allow her eyes to confirm this shameful betrayal’ (p. 110). Now Pollock is looking around the room; he catches the eye of Lady Matheson who involuntarily nods back to him, and then refuses to meet Mrs Railton-Bell’s stare. In performance, the audience’s eyes dart between Mrs Railton-Bell and her erstwhile victim, and it is Sibyl whose gaze resolves the contest. As Pollock appeared Sibyl had been staring at him; now she is staring at her mother. In this tightly-realized silent struggle of wills, Sibyl’s simple response to her mother’s attempt to take her out into the lounge—‘No, Mummy’ (p. 111)—clinches the dramatic shift in a quietly sensational peripeteia. The effect is to force this failed Medusa to essay a quietly dignified exit; but, as with John Malcolm, even this is unsuccessful as her exit is pre-empted by the sound of her daughter exchange pleasantries with her mother’s intended victim.

  The entire scene takes little more than five minutes of stage time, and the dialogue is all utterly banal, touching on nothing more dramatic than the weather, the racing, the cricket and the menu, yet the scene is powerfully emotional and joyously theatrical. The reversal of power is effected through the reversal of the gaze and completed by Mrs Railton-Bell’s own expulsion from the stage space, and yet nothing appears to have been said. The rejection of the hostile gaze restores the kindlier relations subtly coded into the very name of the hotel Beauregard. And the play ends, as it began: ‘a decorous silence, broken only by the renewed murmur of “the casuals”, reigns once more, and the dining-room of the Beauregard Private Hotel no longer gives any sign of the battle that has just been fought and won between its four walls’ (p. 113).

  These subtextual dynamics have often encouraged critics to wonder if there were an earlier draft with Pollock’s ‘real’ crime intact. Rumours of such first drafts have circulated around several of Rattigan’s plays, notably The Deep Blue Sea, but have usually proved groundless. It is certainly the case that Rattigan originally conceived Separate Tables as one about a homosexual offence. He later claimed that so urgent was his desire to address the battles being waged around homosexuality in the 1950s that for a while he forgot about the censorship. ‘I had already reached the point where the Major’s offence was to be revealed before I realised that, if I were to get the play done in the West End at all, I would have to find a way round the Lord Chamberlain’s present objection to any mention of this particular subject’.21

  This would seem to have been the end of the story, were it not for the remarkable recent discovery in the Rattigan archive of an alternative version of Separate Tables with the homosexual subtext brought to the surface. It seems that in 1956, while preparing for the Broadway premiere, Rattigan had decided that, since no legal prohibition against homosexual representation existed on the New York stage, this was a good opportunity to restore Pollock’s ‘real’ crime. Supported by various friends, including Alec Guinness, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Peter Glenville, he wrote to his American producer, Bob Whitehead, on 29 August 1956, with five new passages, that entirely alter the story of Pollock’s arrest. Now he has been bound over at one in the morning after persistently importuning male persons on the Esplanade.

  Whitehead was, however, uncomfortable about the changes. He claimed that they would place disproportionate emphasis on the new theme, and undoubtedly revive comment about Gielgud’s arrest. More persuasively he noted that there had recently been several plays on the subject in New York and that it had ‘almost become a cliché on the Broadway stage’.22 This latter point was undoubtedly true, with Tea and Sympathy (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) being only the two most prominent Broadway plays addressing homosexuality. More crucially, Eric Portman, who was to reprise his roles as John Malcolm and David Pollock in the Broadway production, was himself gay, but was anxious, as many actors were, not to become associated with homosexuality in the public mind. As a result, Rattigan backed down. The alternative scenes remained unread and unperformed for almost forty years, until Geoffrey Wansell, researching for his 1995 biography unearthed them. This edition, for the first time, contains, alongside the familiar text, the full set of alternative scenes, which when substituted transform the story of Pollock’s crime (see pp. 115-120).

  A note of caution should be introduced, however; the ‘gay version’ is not the ‘original version’, as has been suggested elsewhere,23 but rather a later revision, which postdates the earlier by some two and a half years. The first version, slyly coded and therefore operating over the head of the Lord Chamberlain, is much more in keeping with Rattigan’s general style, and indeed fits more completely with the play’s determination to promote the value of not making sexuality an object for public scrutiny and social control. More practically, while in the 1950s groping women in a cinema was clearly considered a lesser outrage than asking men for lights on the sea front, now audiences are surely inclined to look more sympathetically on the latter than the former. And so skilled is Rattigan’s use of indirection, subtext and double-meaning, that the ‘out’ version of the play lacks the complexity of the semi-closeted one.

  That said, there is considerable interest in the revised version of the play. The detail of the events as Rattigan recounts them, with the coded, conventional request for a light and the exchange of words leading to a ‘certain suggestion’ (p. 116), gives a glimpse of a whole area of homosexual experience with which Rattigan is clearly more familiar than he is with the business of molesting wom
en in darkened rooms. In addition, certain aspects of the story take on a far clearer meaning. In the original, the woman who complains, Mrs Osborn, is mildly criticised by some of the residents; Charles finds ‘her motives in complaining […] extremely questionable’ (p. 86). Apart from the general sense that she was vindictively making a nuisance of herself—a rather peculiar allegation—this comment is obscure. In the later version, however, the masculinized Mr Osborne has apparently admitted to having ‘twice previously given evidence in Bournemouth in similar cases, but refused to admit that he had acted as “a stooge” for the police’ (p. 116). The significance of this is even clearer in the original manuscript, in which Osborne denies that ‘he had acted as “a stooge” for the police against prosecution’.24 The suggestion here is that Mr Osborne is a homosexual who has been blackmailed by the police into entrapping others in exchange for immunity from prosecution. This and other deeply unethical forms of police activity were always denied at the time, yet were widely known to take place, often coming to light during the many high profile trials that marked the decade.25

  It is ironic that Separate Tables should have gained the reputation of being the play that was written for Aunt Edna, since in both its versions it remains a complex challenge to the possible prejudices of this illustrious matriarch; ironic, too, because as well as being Rattigan’s last play before the revolution marked by Look Back in Anger, the first and often underrated part of Separate Tables—Table by the Window—bears an uncanny resemblance to Osborne’s play. In Rattigan’s manuscript notes, he describes it as the ‘reverse of DBS’.26 In The Deep Blue Sea Hester and Freddie are forced apart by the near-tragic consequences of their relationship, which Hester describes in terms of an evil affinity.27 In Table by the Window we see a couple who have a similarly destructive effect on each other but who also cannot live apart. As Rattigan put in his notes, ‘Better for evil affinity to continue to torture each other, than to be tortured alone’.28 By the end of the first play, this mutually-destructive couple have uneasily decided to make a second attempt at being together, again preferring human contact, however precarious, to bleak isolation. In this, Separate Tables provides a link between the comic treatment of the same theme in Coward’s Private Lives (1930),29 and the brutally serious handling of it in Look Back in Anger (1956).30