French Without Tears is one of the great queer plays of the twentieth century wrapped up in one of the great comedies of the twentieth century. Most users should sign in with their email address. but they create an immaculately balanced structure: the mild hysteria of Alex Bhat's sardonic Alan is countered by Williams Belchambers's Commander Rogers, calm and mature, with a hint of the juvenile. This is a preview of subscription content, The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40997-9_2, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0). Joe Eyre' Kit Neilan is a high-intensity performance, as he whirls ever more in the paradoxes of love with style, which contrasts with Tom Hanson's Brian Curtis, all affable cynicism and relentlessly unaccented French. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 185.12.108.109. By the end she could just enter the room at the right time to get a laugh. Report. And there's something else interesting about this production. To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. There are moments of great farce but there are also moments of real tenderness, particularly around the character of Jacqueline, M Maingot's daughter who is, for much of the play, silently in love with Kit. It is, without effort, a very queer play. Gaunt's confidence with the role released the humour in the play's most basic mechanisms.
Photo © Richard Davenport. She begins the play attached to Kit but when Commander Rogers arrives she decides she must have him too. To be honest, I am not sure if I thought this was a performable interpretation or merely a textual one. Tonight I feel a bit like Binro the Heretic to discover that I was right. Feel free to get in touch. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. Extra content: visit the official Rattigan website here. This is the best Rattigan production I've seen since the National's After the Dance. Rattigan in this play reckons with his inheritance from Shaw by adapting Shaw’s reversed love chase, but Rattigan adds a homoerotic subtext foreign to Shaw. Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips. Jean Gooder, French without Tears: A Note on ‘Edith Wharton Studies’, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume XXV, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 190–196, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/XXV.2.190. Unlock This Study Guide Now. And third, because we surround the action, the theatre becomes a pressure cooker in which the pattern of tension and laughter is explosive; last night the theatre boomed with laughter all the way through. The cast are mostly pretty new to the stage. In 1994, I wrote my introduction to the Nick Hern Books edition of the play and, reading it then, I was very struck by the patterning of camp humour, transvestism, gender confusions and general queerness, as well as the very witty observation of male fears of desire. The transvestism of the Casino night (either side of the interval) is given full absurd value; Alan and Kit's confusions about sexuality, particularly in Alan's description of the perfect woman ('she will have all of the masculine virtues and none of the feminine vices') are allowed to resonate, and Kenneth Lake, Diana's younger brother, is allowed to have a sweet, moving, unacknowledged crush on Alan through the length of the play. Binro the Heretic was played by Timothy Bateson who had the distinction of being the first Lucky in Waiting for Godot on the British stage, taking the role at the Arts Theatre in 1955, in the production directed by Peter Hall, one of the productions that announced the change in British theatrical fashions that made Rattigan seem old-fashioned. The play ends with Diana threatening to go back to London, in pursuit of Alan who has decided to throw away a potential career in the Diplomatic Service in favour of becoming a writer (this was indeed Rattigan's own wish). Here I analyze Rattigan’s early critical and commercial success, French Without Tears, showing how it is underpinned by the myth of Diana and Actaeon and imitates Shaw’s Man and Superman, where the structure of comedy is varied by having the female pursue the male. I am so wrong. Search for other works by this author on: You do not currently have access to this article. A month ago, as I revisited my argument to write a short article for the Orange Tree's programme, I was genuinely unsure whether maybe I'd just misread the play. Now we know how to get rid of any old-fashioned taint to Rattigan's work: treat his plays as serious proper plays with persistent and sophisticated things to tell us about who we are. My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye.
Miller and his young cast do not miss a note - the play is just a riot. Here the humour catches light but what also became much clearer and sharper was Rattigan's careful exploration of male sexuality and, in particular, the way the heterosexuality of these characters shade into homosociality or something even more profoundly homosexual. Part of Springer Nature. Eighty years later, Rattigan's first big hit is a hit again. Abstract. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. I also discuss the debate over the Play of Ideas conducted in 1950 in the New Statesman and Nation that Rattigan started and finished with several playwrights, including Shaw, who variously rebutted Rattigan’s argument that plays should be about character and situation rather than about ideas. French Without Tears continues demonstrating Rattigan’s dramatic art, as will all subsequent chapters. French Without Tears is one of the great queer plays of the twentieth century wrapped up in one of the great comedies of the twentieth century. It's riotously funny. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Here I analyze Rattigan’s early critical and commercial success, French Without Tears, showing how it is underpinned by the myth of Diana and Actaeon and imitates Shaw’s Man and Superman, where the structure of comedy is varied by having the female pursue the male. If you don't know it - and why should you? - the play is set in France in the home of Monsieur Maingot, to which a group of Englishmen have been sent in order to be taught French. pp 17-37 |
She is, as one character puts it, 'rather fast'. The Orange Tree turns out to be the perfect place for French Without Tears, for three reasons. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available, The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright Binro was once a scientist who believed that the planet of Ribos revolved around the sun, which produced its long seasons of Ice Time and Sun Time, and that the stars were not ice crystals but suns around which revolved other planets. Paul Miller has directed the play before, for English Touring Theatre, in 2007, which I saw on tour when it came to the Richmond Theatre, just round the corner from the Orange Tree.
So I've been writing about Terence Rattigan's plays for twenty-five years now and what I love is that he still has the capacity to surprise me.
Not logged in