Adventure Story [antikvár]

Note on the Author Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London in 1911 and educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Oxford. His first great success as a playwright was with French without Tears, performed more than 1,000 times at the Criterion Theatre, London, beginning in November 1936. During the Second World War he served in the R.A.F. as an air gunner, and also became the only author who has had two plays performed more than a thousand consecutive times, the second being While the Sun Shines (1943), w^hich had over 1,100 performances at the Globe Theatre. Since then he has written a number of other successes, including The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), Adventure Story (1949), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Separate Tables (1954), and Ross, based on the life of Lawrence of Arabia, which was produced at the Haymarket Theatre in i960. Nearly all the plays mentioned here have also been filmed. ADVENTURE STORY Introduction Most of us have heard of Alexander of Macedón, but all we know about him as a person amounts to very little. We know certain external facts: he was the son of Philip of Macedón, and is usually known as Alexander the Great; he cut the Gordian knot, and his favourite horse was called Bucephalus; he conquered a large part of the known world of his day, and wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. This last " factwhich apparently derives from a statement by Plutarch that Alexander became downcast on hearing of other people's conquests because they left him less to conquer, is possibly the most important clue to the kind of person he was. In this play Mr. Rattigan portrays the historical Alexander very faithfully, at the same time revealing that his life was what it was because he was the kind of person who very well might have wept because nothing remained to conquer. Nothing, that is, but tl^e desire for | conquest. Yet he does^hot seek to show thi^' there waF"" any~one single and supreme reason for this insatiable appetite for wider territories and greater glory. It is possible to detect in the play two reasons, apart from the imtujaLd^sixe tO-Sxe^ as a military f leader, which led Alexander to embai^'^on T career of conquest. When the play was first presented on radio, Kenneth Hurren wrote: " Alexander here is a conqueror driven by the ideal of establishing permanent peace in