Love in Idleness / Less Than Kind

by Terence Rattigan

  That Rattigan was experiencing the world of High Tory High Society as he was politically eviscerating Less Than Kind has led some commentators to suggest that the final draft echoes Rattigan’s new Conservative allegiances. If so, these allegiances were only briefly and lightly held. Rattigan at the end of his life was always proud to say he’d never voted Tory; his plays after this point do not show any particular drift to the right; and, in fact, Terry was already rich and well-connected. It may have complicated the political picture he painted in Less Than Kind to meet the socialites he had implicitly criticised, but I think it more likely that Rattigan, with his near-pathological desire to be liked, went along with the suggested changes out of a deep-seated desire to please.

  There is a curious moment in the opening scene of Love in Idleness that points to a more subtextual set of political questions that Rattigan is addressing in several of his plays at that time. In her first discussion with Sir John, it transpires that Olivia does not know her son’s age. It is left to Sir John to calculate that he is seventeen and eight months, just shy of adulthood. In Less Than Kind, perhaps even more curiously, Rattigan, too, is confused about Michael’s age. He has Sir John carry out the same calculation with the same result. However a page later, Olivia gives his age as ‘nearly seventeen’. Neither calculation is consistent with the rest of the play.43 This confusion points to a deeper concern about the meaning of Michael’s age. Is he an adult or a child? The man of the house or a mere boy? Are his opinions independent adult perceptions of the world or juvenile prejudices? Jon Savage’s study of changing definitions of youth identity points out that 1944 – the year in which this play went from first draft to first night – is the year that coined the term ‘teenager’.44 The invention of the word did not, of course, bring the teenager into being: inventing the word acknowledged a new kind of person that had already existed, unnamed, for two decades: a new, independent, educated, somewhat leisured stratum of young people – no longer children, but not yet fully adult. Before the limits placed on child labour in the late-nineteenth century and the expansion of secondary schooling in the early twentieth, the question of these young people’s identity did not so sharply arise. Though we tend to associate the teenager with the 1950s, many of the features of this subcultural identity were already in place by the 1930s.45 Michael is perhaps the first depiction of a teenager, with all that implies, in British drama: ‘he’s at that rather awkward age,’ says Olivia (p. 167).

  Love in Idleness retains enough of the original play to demonstrate a pattern in Rattigan’s work of the era in his representation of young people. However marginalised he has become in the final draft, Michael is one of three portraits of young people in Rattigan’s plays of the decade, alongside Ronnie Winslow in The Winslow Boy and Taplow in The Browning Version. In all three plays, the young characters are placed in some conflict with their elders and get the better of them too. Michael and Taplow are characters of whose motives we have reason to be suspicious, while Ronnie’s actual guilt or innocence is somewhat left behind by the grandstanding of Sir Robert Morton. Across the three plays, Rattigan is offering a portrait of youth that is also a portrait of the youthful politics of his age. The challenge, optimism and threat that the three boys offer asks the question, what is the next generation to be? The confusion over ages, the ambiguity about their motives, is perhaps a sign of a generation struggling for identity.

  Many commentators have noted the debt Love in Idleness owes to perhaps the most famous portrait of a young man in the English language: Hamlet. Both tell the story of a young man, resentful of the man who has replaced his dead father in his mother’s affections; Michael’s moods are perhaps the equivalent of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.179)46; his absorption in a book on poisoning like Hamlet’s ‘words, words, words’ (2.2.192); his black tie Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ (1.2.77); his offer of tickets to Murder in the Family Hamlet’s Murder of Gonzago (3.2); Michael, as Sir John predicts, insists on a ‘closet scene’ (3.4) with his mother. The title Less Than Kind comes from Hamlet’s snarky response to his uncle addressing him as his son: ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65). This is more than Rattigan thumbing a free ride on a classic play; Hamlet is the original tempestuous family drama in the English language, and it places its psychological study of an individual young man in a context of profound political and social change.

  Rattigan’s Hamlet, however, appears to be filtered through psychoanalysis. Freud’s works, with their explosive description of infantile sexuality and complex inter-familial sexual feelings, were one of Rattigan’s philosophical obsessions at Harrow, the books passed furtively under the noses of the schoolmasters. One of the most famous psychoanalytic essays on literature is an analysis of Hamlet by Freud’s close friend and biographer Ernest Jones. Jones argues that Hamlet’s famous indecision and delay are produced by a psychological blockage. During the Oedipal Phase, infants entertain a fantasy of killing their father and taking his place in the mother’s affections. This wish is repressed but remains an unconscious desire. Hamlet’s failure to act – to kill Claudius – is because Claudius has done precisely what Hamlet wishes to do: he has killed Hamlet’s father and is now sleeping with his mother. To kill Claudius is, at an unconscious level, to kill himself. Jones explains that a boy with a widowed mother ‘may remain throughout life abnormally attached to his mother and unable to love any other woman, a not uncommon cause of bachelorhood’.47 Rattigan, whose philandering father was often absent, certainly had a close relationship with his mother, Vera, and took a Freudian view of his own homosexuality. In his wealth and status, Rattigan resembled Sir John; in his wooing by the even wealthier and better-connected ‘Chips’ Channon, he had something of Olivia about him; but it may be that the most compelling portrait of himself in any of his plays is Michael.

  Rattigan never produced a final performance draft of Less Than Kind; instead he was sidetracked into turning it into a rather different play, Love in Idleness. He always learned a good deal from seeing his plays being rehearsed, offering rewrites, cuts and other changes which greatly assisted in shaping the final draft. After the run, he always made further changes when preparing definitive editions for his Collected Plays. We do not have such a finalised script for Less Than Kind, but in early 2011, Rattigan’s former friend and lover, Adrian Brown, directed the world premiere of Less Than Kind at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, editing the script down by almost a quarter, revealing it as the sleek, funny, complex play that Rattigan surely intended it to be.

  One might have worried that the play had dated. Less Than Kind is, as I have said, very much of its time, imbued with debates about the course of Britain after the Second World War. But, premiering during a recession produced by one of the recurrent convulsions of global capitalism, its debates seemed lively and to the point. Even the ridiculous offstage Bojo Sprott-Williams, who blows a hunting horn in The Dorchester and tries to stand on his head (p. 205), sounded a familiar note, since London’s conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, was sometimes satirically referred to as Bo-Jo and – like the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer of the time – an alumnus of the infamous Bullingdon Club, a select dining club for the young and very rich whose evenings frequently ended in restaurants being destroyed and paid for in cash. Michael Simkins was widely admired for his performance as Sir John, revealing him ‘not as some bloated monster but as a canny operator who suavely announces “we’re all progressives nowadays”.’48 Olivia was played by Sarah Crowe as ‘a marvel of brittle wit and an abyss of self-doubt’.49 David Osmond was applauded for his ‘beautiful air of arrogant naivety’,50 though in general the production still seemed tilted against Michael, whose opinions, couched in the slang of the 1940s, seemed priggish at best. What struck all the critics, however, was not so much the comedy as ‘that edge of raw, largely unspoken pain that is Rattigan’s greatest gift as a dramatist’.51

  There are good things in both versions of this play, and fo
r anyone interested in Rattigan’s work, publishing these two versions side by side will be a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s process, as well as offering a privileged perspective on the political battles in British theatre. Somewhere, between the two plays, lies a forgotten classic and perhaps an enterprising director might like to attempt a synthesis of the two, retaining the political complexity of the former and the tautness and theatrical assuredness of the latter. But even with the compromises Rattigan made, Love in Idleness persuaded one reviewer ‘that soon Rattigan will cease to flick his fingers and begin to crack his whip… that he will write a play that will cause the sort of social uproar which it should be one of theatre’s functions to create.’ Rattigan’s next play was The Winslow Boy and it ushered in the most creative decade of his career, one in which he would produce a handful of the most emotionally profound plays of the century.

  DAN REBELLATO

  Notes

  1.Maurice Zolotow, Stagestruck; the romance of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, New York: Harcourt, 1965, p. 245.

  2.Strangely, the Rattigan papers at the British Library contain no drafts of Less Than Kind or Love in Idleness, except for some subsequent drafts of a screenplay. The only manuscript evidence of the development of the play we have available to us is a copy of Less Than Kind submitted to the Lord Chamberlain in August 1944, on which the current edition is based. There is other evidence that this was the outcome of a preliminary round of discussions with the Lunts: in a letter to his mother written during rehearsal, Rattigan writes ‘Alfred is less obviously right for the part, and I have had to change it, as you know, to a Canadian’ (Terence Rattigan. Letter to Vera Rattigan. [c. November 1944]. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74309). In the Lord Chamberlain’s copy, Sir John is already Canadian, implying the existence of a currently lost very first draft, written for Gertrude Lawrence.

  3.Zolotow, op. cit., p. 246.

  4.The two cuts were (a) Sir John’s exasperated clarification to Parker at the Ministry over the name of the downmarket Barons Court restaurant: ‘No, no, no, Parker. Tuck Inn. Tuck…’ (p. 143), which the Lord Chamberlain, perhaps correctly, suspected was intended to evoke a much ruder word in the audience’s mind and (b) ‘po-face’: a mild lavatorial reference, one might think, but which nonetheless contravened the censor’s fastidious sense of theatrical decency. H. C. Game. Reader’s Report. 26 August 1944. Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence: Less Than Kind, 1944/5735.

  5.Michael Darlow. Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work. London: Quartet, 2000, p. 181.

  6.Rattigan. Letter to Vera Rattigan. [c. November 1944] op. cit.

  7.Zolotow, op. cit., p. 249.

  8.Coward had insisted that the ending of Flare Path was a disaster and, at a preview of While the Sun Shines, went down the line of actors mocking their performances. Darlow, op. cit., p. 151, 167.

  9.Quoted in Zolotow, op. cit., p. 247.

  10.Darlow, op. cit., p. 248.

  11.Brown, Jared. The Fabulous Lunts: A Biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

  12.Quoted in Zolotow, op. cit., p. 248.

  13.Philip Page. Review. Daily Mail. 21 December 1944; Recorder 30 December 1944, in: Love in Idleness Scrapbook [hereafter Scrapbook]. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74547, pp. 4, 7.

  14.Rationing was to affect the production in other ways. Fuel was still strongly controlled and theatre heating was not a priority. In the cold winter of 1944, audiences would sit through the play in fur coats, an option not available to Lynn Fontanne, who, on Boxing Day, played the play in a temperature of 4ºC and claimed that her arms had turned blue by the curtain call. Brown, op. cit., p. 364.

  15.Ivor Brown. Observer. 24 December 1944. p. 2, in: Production File: Love in Idleness, Lyric Theatre, December 1944 V&A Blythe House Archive. Baxter in Scrapbook, op. cit., pp. 6, 16.

  16.Recorder 30 December 1944, op. cit.

  17.Brown and Baxter op. cit.; A. E. Wilson. ‘Another Lunt Triumph’. Star. 21 December 1944, Herbert Farjeon. ‘The Lunt Legend Still Holds Good’. Sunday Graphic. 24 December 1944, F[rances]. S[tephens]. Theatre World. 3 March 1945, in: Scrapbook, pp. 14, 12, 22.

  18.Ironically, perhaps, it is widely thought that the Lunts’ was a lavender marriage and that Alfred and Lynn had a number of discreet homosexual affairs. In the 1930s this was well known and commentators have suggested that ‘they tested the boundaries of sexual expression onstage in a period of increasing anti-gay repression’ (Abel-Palmer, Sam. ‘Lunt, Alfred David Jr.’ The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy. Eds. Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra and Robert A Schanke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 262–3). Their performance in the polymorphously perverse Design for Living was perhaps the most high-profile theatrical contribution to what was called the ‘pansy craze’ of the 1920s and ’30s, in which openly gay performers found a sudden popularity and acceptance; in the 1940s, the authorities began to clamp down on the underground clubs from which these performers sprang and so, in Love in Idleness, we find the Lunts at a much more conservative phase of their career.

  19.Ivor Brown op. cit.; The Times review, 21 December 1944, p. 6; W. A. Darlington. Daily Telegraph. 21.12.44, Scrapbook, p. 4; John Mason Brown. Saturday Review. 16 Feb 1946, p. 34.

  20.Ernest Betts. ‘Never an empty seat for Lunts’ run’. Daily Express. 23 June 1945 in Scrapbook, p. 26.

  21.Court Circular. The Times. Monday, 29 January 1945, p. 6.

  22.Brown, op. cit., p. 365.

  23.Ibid., pp. 365–6.

  24.Ibid., p. 372.

  25.Vernon Rice. ‘Incomparable Lunts Bring Magic to O Mistress Mine’. New York Post. 24 January 1946, Scrapbook, p. 32.

  26.Brown, op. cit., p. 373.

  27.Zolotow, op. cit., p. 247; Brown, op. cit., p. 375.

  28.Philip Page. Sphere. n.d., Scrapbook, p. 10.

  29.Ibid., p. 35ff.

  30.O Mistress Mine Correspondence. Rattigan Papers: British Library, Add. MSS. 74309.

  31.Coincidentally, McCarthy’s best-known film is probably Patton, his biopic of the US General, though the movie sadly ignores his visit to Love in Idleness in Paris.

  32.Arts Council of Great Britain. Fourth Annual Report, 1948–49. London: Arts Council, 1949, passim.

  33.Quoted in Darlow op. cit., p. 179.

  34.Ibid., p. 180.

  35.Rattigan. Letter to Vera Rattigan. [c. November 1944] op. cit.

  36.Rattigan would return to the motif of a father exploiting his son sexually in Man and Boy, in which a ruthless financier pretends that his son is his gay lover, in order to win a contract with a gay businessman.

  37.Quoted in Darlow, op. cit., p. 185.

  38.Terence Rattigan. ‘Concerning the Play of Ideas.’ New Statesman and Nation (1950): 241-42.

  39.J. B. Priestley. Time and the Conways and Other Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 207.

  40.Darlow, op. cit., p. 126.

  41.Henry Channon and Robert Rhodes James. Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967, p. 38.

  42.Geoffrey Wansell. Terence Rattigan: A Biography. London: Fourth Estate, 1995, p. 147.

  43.Even supposing John’s calculation is correct, if Michael turned twelve in May 1939, that would place the action of the play in February 1945 (almost nine months after the play was first written). It is unlikely that Rattigan intended to write a play set in the future so we could assume that they sent Michael away in 1938, though it seems unlikely. But in any case, the opening stage directions place the play at ‘about 7 p.m. of a summer day’, a setting that is vaguely supported when Sir John enters with a bouquet of spring flowers. This kind of inconsistency would be picked up in rehearsal and indeed all references to spring and summer have been eradicated in Love in Idleness. My feeling is that the pastoral summer setting is part of the first draft’s play with genre, so in Less Than Kind, Michael’s birthday is in October.

  44.Jon Savage. Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945. London
: Pimlico, 2007, p. xiii.

  45.A key study of this phenomenon is David Fowler. The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain. The Woburn Education Series. London: Woburn Press, 1995.

  46.Act, scene and page references to William Shakespeare. Hamlet. Ed. G.R. Hibbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

  47.Ernest Jones. ‘The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive’ The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (1910), p. 93.

  48.Michael Billington. Review. Guardian. 12 January 2011. All reviews can be found in Theatre Record 31.1-2 (February 2011): pp. 63–65.

  49.Robert Shore. Review. Metro. 31 January 2011.

  50.Libby Purves. Review. The Times. 24 January 2011.

  51.Charles Spencer. Review. Daily Telegraph. 25 January 2011.

  I would like to thank Helen Nicholson, Michael Darlow, and Morag McFarland for their help in researching this introduction.

  D.R.

  List of Rattigan’s Produced Plays

  TITLE

  BRITISH PREMIERE

  NEW YORK PREMIERE

  First Episode

  (with Philip Heimann)

  Q Theatre, Kew,

  11 Sept 1933

  (transferred to Comedy

  Theatre, 26 Jan 1934

  Ritz Theatre,

  17 Sept 1934

  French Without Tears

  Criterion Theatre,

  6 Nov 1936

  Henry Miller Theatre,

  28 Sept 1937

  After the Dance