Terence Rattigan

I’ve only gone and blogged again at the Guardian. Follow this link and you’ll see my piece on Terence Rattigan and the well-made play.

I’m arguing that the dismissal of Rattigan because the well-made play was old-fashioned and inadequate was misplaced. Rattigan used the well-made play as a kind of metonym of the kind of society that was unable to cope with emotional outsiders. That’s the course of his brilliance as a playwright; he makes you cry (and cheer) because he finds the spaces between the harsh lines of the well-made play formula and in doing so he subjects the society he depicts to sharp critique.