French Without Tears

• Terence Rattigan

   

Article

RATTIGAN WITHOUT TEARS
Dan Rebellato

For the theatregoers of the mid-twentieth century, French Without Tears was an unforgettable experience, one of those evenings of unalloyed delight that define a generation. This was the generation after Coward and before Osborne, the generation that experienced the best work of J. B. Priestley, the brief-blazing brilliance of Christopher Fry, T. S. Eliot’s austere experiments and Rodney Ackland’s brutal satires. French Without Tears appeared to come from nowhere, making a theatrical star of its young author, and also introducing the suave comic authority of Rex Harrison. It won over the critics, audiences, made a fortune, and ran for two and a half years.

And then, all of a sudden, the play disappeared. After Look Back in Anger, there could be no place for the light comic touches that make French Without Tears seem so effortless, so chic, so je ne sais quoi. In an era of social comment, artistic seriousness, when audiences were to be challenged rather than amused, the play’s great reputation as one of the finest light comedies of the 1930s became its death sentence. While Rattigan’s reputation has revived considerably over the last fifteen years, aided by a series of revivals that have revealed the complexity of Rattigan’s emotions and the seriousness of his craft, French Without Tears has been left behind.

It’s a pity because while this is indeed the lightest of comedies, the fact that it is so gives it a depth, intelligence and seriousness that is both hugely entertaining, and slyly subversive. The play centres on a group of young men and women passing a careless summer in a French crammer by the sea, learning to parler français, before they join the diplomatic service. The men spend very little time learning French and a good deal more trying to escape (or embrace?) the clutches of the dangerously fascinating Diana Lake. But beneath the very good jokes and the farcical business there’s a profound sense of desperation.

In one way, this is unsurprising. Frank Rattigan, Terry’s father, was unimpressed by his son’s theatrical ambitions and wanted him to follow in his own footsteps as a diplomat. Terry managed to negotiate a year’s grace to prove that he could make his living as a playwright. If, once the year was up, he had made no headway in his chosen career, he would fall in line with his father’s wishes and pursue a diplomatic career. If there is an edge to the farce – a sense of belle époque, avant la deluge, as Brian Curtis might put it – perhaps it is because the characters and their author shared common purpose.

Is the play dated? It’s true that the attitudes expressed by the men towards women seem unthinkingly chauvinistic. But this is where the play’s contemporaneity lies. The play lays bare the courtship rituals of the amorous male, in all his absurdity and contradiction. The play pivots around the men’s desire not to desire Diana Lake. As each falls (with comic ease) under her spell, the others react as if they are under threat from military attack: ‘who is to fire the first shot of the salvo?’ demands Alan. ‘Very well, I must engage the enemy on your behalf.’

Rattigan’s own sexuality has provided several commentators with dubious grounds for detecting secret gay plays beneath their apparently straight exteriors. This is to underestimate Rattigan’s ability to imagine people quite unlike himself, but undoubtedly his recent contact with the gay theatrical circles around John Gielgud and his partner led to a newfound confidence in his sexuality and an off-centre position from which to observe the heterosexual dance.

There is some very enjoyable campery in the business between the men. They refer to one another as ‘babe’, ‘my dear’, ‘child’, and ‘ducky’, and on the night of Bastille Day, they enter into a carnivalesque riot of upturned conventions, with two of the men in skirts, and another in the campest of uniforms, the sailor suit. One character refers to another as ‘a bedraggled old fairy queen’ and an elderly man solemnly announces that he is going to dance the can-can. It’s not long before they are getting drunk and trying to whip each other’s skirts off. Rattigan’s mixture of farce and high comedy generates a comic momentum that allows the characters’ sexual tensions, their fragile sexual identities, their barely containable and free-floating desires, to spin giddyingly and irresistibly out of control.

French Without Tears deserves to regain its place not just as one of the finest plays by one of our finest modern writers, but also as one of the great achievements of the comic stage, and a demonstration, if we ever needed it, that comedy is often just tragedy without tears.

Dan Rebellato is an academic and playwright.  He is Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and is an expert on post-war British Theatre.