It is surely unimaginable that one of Terence Rattigan's plays might now be staged in Ireland. Among the many reasons for this, the most obvious is the essential Englishness of the writer; the themes of his work and the manner in which they are explored would be so entirely alien to many of his own countrymen, let alone to the citizens of another state. This is true even of Ireland with which he had ancestral links, as both his parents came from well known Irish legal families.
Rattigan appears to have been almost unaware of the limitation of his own vision; even when he tackled the story of Alexander the Great (in Adventure Story, a title redolent of English comics) his subject talks as though he were a vaguely troubled senior member of the British army. Self-awareness was never a characteristic of this writer, who preferred not to investigate his own personality for fear of what might be discovered there. Both in life and art, he presented a facade of immaculate restraint, dangerously prone to parody; indeed, in the 1960s the kind of play Rattigan had made his own, in which the principal characters constantly resist speaking about what most concerns them, did begin to be openly mocked by a new generation of comic authors. This caused him enormous pain but, true to his temperament, for much of the time he insisted on keeping his opinions to himself. But in the aftermath of the failure of his play, Man and Boy, in 1963, he wrote a letter to the critic Alexander Walker who had been particularly damning of his work. As an indication of how much fury he had bottled up, this letter ran to 25 pages.
Occasionally, the speeches of self-restraint in his work can be enormously poignant as is the case with The Deep Blue Sea (1952). Unusually, the protagonist in this play is a woman, Hester Collyer, and Rattigan evidently felt he could be more emotionally unbuttoned than usual. There are similarities here with Pedro Almodovar's most recent film, All About My Mother, in which constant references are made to the plays of Lorca and Tennessee Williams; like them, Almodovar tends to make women the central figures of his dramas, presumably because he believes they are capable of greater emotional development than men.
The Deep Blue Sea suggests Rattigan felt likewise but his own inhibitions meant that he forced himself to write about the problems faced by men often as inarticulate as himself. It is customary to argue that this inarticulacy arose from a fear of his homosexuality being made public. Hilariously, in 1950 a Sunday newspaper ran a feature on Britain's three most eligible bachelors - Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Norman Hartnell - and asked "Why can't they find the right girl?" The circumstances of the time and the audience for whom Rattigan wrote exercised a powerful authority over him. Because he wanted popular success, his plays proved to be exercises in polished technique comfortably spread over three acts. Anachronistic even when first written - they belong to the earlier era of Granville Barker and Pinero - their content takes second place to form.
When, in 1956, an unknown young actor called John Osborne burst on the scene with the play he had written, Look Back in Anger, Rattigan disliked it so much he had to be persuaded not to leave at the interval on the first night. While others hailed the work as a new departure in British theatre, the older playwright failed to see its merits. What, he inquired, was there for Jimmy Porter to look back in anger about? Overall, however, Rattigan's biographer Michael Darlow seems indifferent to many of the difficulties attached to Rattigan today and, as an unabashed admirer, cannot bring himself to write anything other than the mildest criticism.
He therefore fails to see something obvious: Terence Rattigan and his work are of interest because they represent an England which, despite its seeming immutability, is now in fact gone for ever.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist