Acting Edition S.
12 total works
Written in the early fifties when Rattigan was at the height of his powers, The Deep Blue Sea is a powerful account of lives blighted by love - or the lack of it.
The play opens with the failed suicide of Hester Collyer (Peggy Ashcroft in the first production), who has deserted her husband for the raffish charms of an ex-fighter pilot.
Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea was first performed at the Duchess Theatre in the West End in March 1952.
This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.
'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington
A masterpiece of light comedy from Terence Rattigan, about a group of bright young things attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid myriad distractions.
French Without Tears is the play that first made Rattigan's name, and ran for over a thousand performances in the 1930s.
This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.
Two linked one-act plays set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth.
In the first of the plays, Table by the Window, a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other, Table Number Seven, a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major accused of importuning women in a local cinema.
Terence Rattigan's play Separate Tables was first produced at the St. James's Theatre, London, in September 1954.
In an alternative version, only recently discovered among Rattigan's papers, the major's offence was revealed to be homosexual; these 'alternative' scenes are published here for the first time.
This edition, edited and introduced by Dan Rebellato, includes a biographical sketch and chronology.
'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington
Based on the true story of Alma Rattenbury, who, in 1935, went on trial with her eighteen-year-old lover for the murder of her husband. In the play, Terence Rattigan pits Alma against a formidable lady juror, whose own life offers a plangent counterpoint to the central tale of love, betrayal, guilt and obsession.
Published in this edition alongside a major revival of the play at The Old Vic, London, Cause Célèbre was Rattigan's last play and was still running in the West End at the time of his death in 1977.
It comes, like the other volumes in NHB's uniform edition of Rattigan's plays, with an authoritative introduction by Rattigan scholar Dan Rebellato.
‘Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan’ - Michael Billington
An almost unbearably moving story of veiled emotions running deep, Terence Rattigan's In Praise of Love is based on the true life situation of Rex Harrison's wife, Kay Kendall, and her early death from cancer.
Lydia is shielding her husband, Sebastian, from the knowledge that she is dying from leukaemia. But Sebastian does know and is seeking to spare her. She dies without either of them openly acknowledging their true feelings...
The play was first produced as a one-act play under the title After Lydia in a double-bill with the short farce, Before Dawn, at the Duchess Theatre, London, in September 1973. Rattigan reworked and extended the play as In Praise of Love for its New York premiere at the Morosco Theatre in December 1974, starring Rex Harrison himself.
This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.
'Few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan' Michael Billington
Terence Rattigan's epic and probing drama about the man immortalised as Lawrence of Arabia.
Arrogant, flippant, withdrawn and with a talent for self-concealment, the mysterious Aircraftman Ross seems an odd recruit for the Royal Air Force. In fact the truth is even stranger than the man himself.
Behind the false name is an enigma, a man named Lawrence who started as a civilian in the Map Office in 1914 and went on to mastermind some of the most audacious military victories in the history of the British Army. These victories earned him an enduring and romantic nom de guerre: Lawrence of Arabia.
Rattigan's 1960 play reveals the unusual and deeply conflicted Englishman behind the heroic legend. This edition, with an Introduction by Dan Rebellato, was published alongside the revival at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2016, directed by Adrian Noble and starring Joseph Fiennes as Ross.
