The Comedies: Until They Became Impossible

Abstract

Rattigan wrote only four comedies after the great success of French Without Tears, the last one in 1953, The Sleeping Prince, because he could no longer express through his plays the optimistic vision required by comedy as a genre. In the first of them, While the Sun Shines (1943), Rattigan draws on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but as if rewritten by Oscar Wilde. Its topicality, suggesting as it does that prewar class distinctions will not survive the war, does not limit it, however, for Rattigan includes some of his key themes, for example, the (mild) sexual humiliation of the secondary female lead. In some respects it also seems to resemble the contemporary American comedy The Philadelphia Story. The theme of intense and fraught father–son relations appears in Rattigan’s next comedy, Love in Idleness, where a wealthy and conservative businessman clashes with his rebellious, socialist stepson. It is a heavier comedy than its two predecessors. In Who is Sylvia? Rattigan painted an indulgent portrait of his philandering father while drawing on the myth of Apollo and Daphne to suggest his, Rattigan’s, views on art, but as its title suggests, Rattigan also draws on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona to acknowledge his father’s betrayals of his mother. The last comedy is the darkest of his five full-length comedies, for The Sleeping Prince ends with its heroine, having reconciled a father and son, departing from an empty stage for a future life of loneliness and sadness.