Rattigan

There is going to be a resurgence of Terence Rattigan plays this year, I read. I'm not surprised: he is a master of the well-made play with its beginning when something has happened to hold the attention and when the main character is in a spot of trouble; how he/she resolves the conflict is the heart of the play. In "The Browning Version" we see a teacher at a public school, quite a tyrant in the classroom, who cannot love his wife in the way she wants to be loved, sexually; he knows she finds that sort of love elsewhere with the chemistry master at the school; he has to decide what he's going to do with his life now that he is about to retire. The problem he has is an intellectual one: while he loves her - or rather has loved her - he can only find satisfaction in the joy of literature; so when a boy gives him a present of Browning's translation of a Latin text he breaks down and "blubs". From this, after his wife tells him that the boy probably gave him the book so as to get a higher mark, he begins to find some strength of character. At the beginning of the play he was a rather pathetic character - and pathetic characters are not suitable for tragedy in dramas - but he emerges as a stronger person able to fulfill himself in the way he wishes to.
There are two kinds of love, said Rattigan: that which expresses itself in animal sexuality and that which cannot express itself other than in a sort of spirituality.
Rattigan conceitedly said of himself: "There's Shakespeare, Chekov and me." Not true. He is not on the same high level. He is a great crafstman; he can tell a story brilliantly and he can execute brilliant "coups" which make you gasp with pleasure. But he is not a great wordsmith in a poetical sense like Shakespeare and he does not fill out his characters with the warmth that Chekov does.
David Aaronovitch, writing in The Times today about the sex traders of the north of England, tries his best to make them believeable and human in that they do not understand our culture, they being mostly Pakistanis (they are, in my opinion beasts who should never have been allowed to perform this trade of young girls - nothing excuses them, they are the scum of the earth). He quotes Freud: "Where they (men) love, they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love. They seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love."
I think this quote applies to Rattigan's life, his homosexuality being one kind of love, his desire to love women the other kind.
I look forward to seeeing some of his plays again: "The Deep Blue Sea"; "The Winslow Boy"; Bequest to the Nation"; "The Browning Version".