The Winslow Boy [antikvár]

The writer on writing Terence Rattigan was born in 1911 and died in 1977. He was one of ttie tew British playwrights who succeeded in making a very comfortable living from his craft, having had nineteen plays produced in London between 1936 and 1977, all of which were enormously popular However, from his schooldays Rattigan had wanted to be taken seriously as a playwright, and that meant he had a desire for critical acclaim as well as popularity with audiences. He wrote in the 1953 preface to a compilation of his plays: Audiences, in short, are unreliable, wilful, incorrigible, obstinate, complacent, and hopelessly contradictory in their choice of entertainment Also in this piece he admits his obsession with what the critics had to say, as he recalls: reading over and over again, with wild anxious, red-rimmed, staring eyes, the brief paragraph. Earlier plays by Rattigan His first successful play, French Without Tears, produced in 1936, was well received by audiences and critics alike, but not expected to be the start of a line of hits. Being a young writer he was given credit for producing a high-spirited charade, a youthful romp, phrases which set the play down as amusing but ultimately unimportant. He was called One-play-Raftigan and complemented on this lucky fluke. One review, however, by James Agate of the Sunday Times, was particularly damning, dismissing the play as Nothing. It has no wit, no plot, no characterisation, nothing The play is set in a language school and Rattigan draws on his own experience of leaning French and German at a 'crammer' during his summer holidays.