Biography Essay

During a career that spanned nearly forty years, from the early 1930s to the 1970s, Terence Rattigan wrote twenty-four dramas for the stage and more than thirty film, television, and radio plays. He demonstrated striking development in comedy, farce, and romance and versatility with history plays, plays about celebrated English court trials, and, most important, his studies of flawed or failed average, middle-class characters, reminiscent of Robert Browning's. Frequently associated with Noel Coward as the last of the major dramatists in the well-made-play tradition, he felt shunned by the stage revolution in London in the mid 1950s. Yet, diversifying and intensifying his themes and style, he continued to write until his death in 1977.

Rapidly changing times and the interaction of personal lives with the events of those times form the subject matter of his dramas. Conflicts between fathers and sons, marital mismatches, the English habit of...