Susan Rusinko on Terence Rattigan

“They are characterized by a refinement of mind and style that time is already beginning to prove are more than English public-school virtues and sleek techniques, as his strongest attackers claimed. Kenneth Tynan's labeling of him as the Formosa of the British theater and then Rattigan's subsequent creation of Aunt Edna, as well as his self-instituted debate in a "battle of the theatres," hounded him throughout most of his career. Yet, in what Hilary Spurling described as that "tricky but crucial (and so far almost wholly neglected) stretch of contemporary theatrical history when the stage became society's distorting mirror," Rattigan occupies a prominent place as the "oblique and delicate playwright of inarticulacy, repression, self-punishment, above all the damage people do to themselves."”

“Each of his dramas is a progressive refinement of that sense of theater of which he spoke so frequently, a sense which insisted on the duality of the playwright as both writer and audience. The loss of touch with the audience which characterized the dramatic experimentation in the revolutionary stage events since 1956 was caused to a certain degree by the elitism of many of the changes. Rattigan never lost touch. To move an audience to laughter and to tears, rather than to confusion or puzzlement, was always his primary goal, and he consistently maintained sight of that goal. Of his contemporary dramatists, he alone survived the upheavals of the 1950s with his traditional approach which renewed itself in his stage comeback of 1970. And before the experimental waves subsided into the mainstream of theater history, Rattigan once more became a part of that stream. His comedies, history plays, and moving dramas about flawed or failed characters course their way unerringly down the moral and emotional mainstream of their troubled times.”