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He had this huge success with French Without Tears —
light comedy, but it contains all the seeds,
you know, immature men, slightly more mature women.
PAUL MILLER: This play was SO successful when he was 25
that he entered into a period
where he worried that he would never be taken seriously as a playwright,
that he'd be known as this writer of light comedy.
So he sets up a main character, Alan, who is a would-be writer
who finds himself in provincial France
where he and some friends of his are studying to learn French
in order to pass the entrance exams into the Diplomatic Corps.
And into this mix is thrown the sister of one of the boys,
who is devastatingly attractive and causes mayhem.
So much of it is about people's failure
to be able to understand their own emotional lives.
The events of the play take place almost entirely within a hermetically sealed world,
so everything you need to know to do the play is in the play —
often a mark of a very good play and particularly of a very good comedy.
The Winslow Boy is a story about a young naval cadet.
He is accused of having stolen a postal order from another boy's locker.
He's been expelled from school.
His family are furious about this. They believe that he's been wronged.
So they get a great barrister to come and see if he'll take up the case.
LINDSAY POSNER: His main interest
is actually the effect of a political act on a family.
In that sense, it's a domestic comedy and tragedy.
Sir Robert Morton turns up in the scene
and the boy's story starts falling apart all over the place.
It ends with Robert Morton just denouncing him
and saying, "I think it's about time you admit that you are a liar and a forger
"and you're causing terrible harm to your family."
And the last lines of the act are him turning to his clerk
and saying, "Have all the papers sent to my chambers."
He says, "Surely, you don't need them now."
He ends the play with the line, "The boy's plainly innocent. I accept the brief."
He's somebody who absolutely knows how to play an audience like a marionette.
LINDSAY: I think it's truly a great play,
in the sense that it does fuse the public and the political worlds
in a very complex and multi-layered way.
In that sense, it becomes very moving.
It supports the idealistic notion of individual rights
and the individual in the face of institutional oppression.
It was written in 1945, just at the end of the Second World War.
There were big things happening politically in England at the time.
What we're really seeing is the strains on a patriarchal father
who sacrifices a lot with his stubborn, wilful nature to win the child.
The Browning Version is an absolutely perfect play.
I think our production was 50-something minutes long. There are no breaks in it.
It's extraordinary to direct something like that because it's like a piece of music
or a beautiful painting.
It's a perfect play, The Browning Version .
It's small and compressed and absolutely devastating,
and people suddenly realised it.
DAN: It's all set on the last day
of a much-disliked schoolteacher's career at a minor public school.
We're in his little apartment
with his wife, who hates him and is having an affair with another teacher.
And there is a boy who has, effectively, been given a kind of detention.
And we know that he's brilliant
and we know that he's terrifying to the kids.
The headmaster comes in and there's another master retiring
and he wants to change the order of them speaking at the final assembly,
so that the other master is prioritised over Crocker-Harris.
It's another lack of recognition of him as a human being.
It's one of those tiny little embarrassing humiliations
that he's probably suffered many times, but the last thing that happens in the play
is he phones the headmaster and insists that he's going to speak last.
The almost classical tragedy form
in which he's created this intense, intimate one-act play,
means that it almost feels like the greatest triumph you've ever heard.
It's like the weight of 30 years of indignity, rather than 30 minutes.
Somebody can just do a single thing and the whole audience are overcome with emotion
because they can perceive everything that's underneath it,
but the repression or the fear or the nature of the characters
means they can't say anything explicit.
So you've had this wonderful drop down
to the bottom of the emotional belly of the human condition
and then just a little upturn, which takes us forward into the rest of his life.
That's what Terence Rattigan is great at.
The thing that was so strange about the way he was dismissed
is he was always dismissed as being stiff upper lip
and people not expressing their emotions.
That's so 100% not what Terence Rattigan is about.
His plays are all about the reasons why people don't express their emotions
and then show you what those emotions are.
He does that so beautifully in all of his plays.