Word: rattigan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Sir Terence Rattigan, 66, prolific British playwright (The Winslow Boy, Separate Tables); of cancer; in Hamilton, Bermuda. After Rattigan left Oxford to write plays, his father supported him during a trial period. Just as it ended, his comedy French Without Tears became a hit and ran for 1,039 performances in London. Rattigan's forte was, as he once said, "the play that unashamedly says nothing-except possibly that human beings are strange creatures, and worth putting on the stage, where they can be laughed at or cried over, as our pleasure takes...
...President Carlton Rattigan, or maybe President Richard Monckton? Could it have been President Sven Ericson? No, it was President Jimmy Carter flickering across the screens of America from the tower of the United Nations to the burned-out South Bronx, then back in the Oval Office and preparing to thunder across America and then halfway around the world...
Once again the actions and antics of the real President seemed destined to dim the best creations of the novelists who gave us Rattigan, Monckton and Ericson. The 2:15 a.m. New York briefing by Press Secretary Jody Powell was the kind of breathless drama the White House used to reserve for wars, assassinations and summits. This one was to announce a tentative agreement about a Geneva conference that may or may not happen some...
...couple's deadly secrets unveiled, Rattigan relies on a kind of question-and-answer man, a mutual American friend, Mark Walters (Martin Gabel), who has become rich writing sex novels, and who dotes on Lydia with unrequited love. Long noted for resonance of voice and clarity of diction, Gabel gets the messages across to the playgoers all right and he may qualify as the highest-paid facsimile of a Western Union boy in the history of the legitimate theater. To give Gabel's unclouded intelligence its due, the gravity of his mien is sometimes tinged with...
...face lineless, her figure trim, her carriage gracefully girlish. In acting subservient to her husband while deftly stage-managing everything, she strongly recalls those '30s heroines of S.N. Behrman's comedies who used to be played by Ina Claire or Katharine Cornell. Harrison and Harris salvage Rattigan, who, though famed for his theatrical carpentry, has on this occasion whittled out a toothpick drama. T.E. Kalem