Terence Rattigan: 13 books

Terence Rattigan’s first play, published for the first time in this edition to mark the centenary of Rattigan’s birth. Written with his fellow student, Philip Heimann, while they were both at Oxford, First Episode shows an infatuated undergraduate, Tony, falling for Margot, an actress ten...

Love in Idleness is the third in Terence Rattigan's unofficial trilogy of war plays (after Flare Path and While the Sun Shines). It is published here alongside an earlier version of the play, Less Than Kind, which was never staged during Rattigan's lifetime. Michael, eighteen, returns to wartime...

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...

Set in a run-down residential hotel in Bournemouth, Separate Tables consists of two linked one-act plays. In the first a lonely divorcee tracks down her former husband in order to resume a kind of half-life with him. In the other a repressed young spinster offers brave moral support to a fake major...

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 Arrogant, flippant, withdrawn and with a talent for self-concealment, the mysterious Aircraftman Ross seems an odd recruit for the Royal Air Force.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...

Rattigan's attack on the moral vacuity of the 'bright young things' of the twenties and thirties, written between French Without Tears and The Deep Blue Sea. David is a high-living, hard-drinking, successful writer involved with two women: his wife Joan and an earnest-minded younger woman,...

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, who has deserted her husband for the raffish charms of an ex-fighter pilot. This...

In Who is Sylvia?, which premiered in the West End in 1950, where it ran for over a year, Rattigan seems to be offering a bittersweet portayal of his father - and maybe of his own frustrated love life. Also included in this volume is Duologue, a play for one actress originally written for television...

Terence Rattigan's sparkling comedy about a group of bright young things attempting to learn French on the Riviera amid myriad distractions, French Without Tears ran for over a thousand performances in the 1930s and remains a delight today. When a group of young men arrives at Professor Maingot’s...

A double bill by Terence Rattigan, featuring two plays of striking contrast that display his astonishing range as a writer. A rarely seen comic gem, Harlequinade follows a classical theatre company whose intrigues and dalliances are revealed with increasingly calamitous consequences in an affectionate...

A moving story of love and loyalty, courage and fear, based on Rattigan's own experiences as a tail gunner in the Second World War. The Falcon Hotel, on the Lincolnshire coast. RAF bomber pilot Teddy is celebrating a reunion with his actress wife Patricia. When Peter, Patricia's ex-lover and...

Rattigan's well-loved play about an unpopular schoolmaster who snatches a last shred of dignity from the collapse of his career and his marriage. Twice filmed (with Michael Redgrave and Albert Finney) and frequently revived. Andrew Crocker-Harris' wife Millie has become embittered and fatigued...

Based on the real-life court case of a young naval cadet unjustly accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and first staged in 1946, The Winslow Boy has been revived many times since, including at The Old Vic in 2013. Ronnie Winslow is expelled from naval college, having been accused...