The Deep Blue Sea

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.

Separate Tables

These two one acts, presented together, depict the hijinks and heartbreak following the residents of a shabby genteel hotel on England's coast. This is 1950s theatre at its finest: chatty, formal and with deliciously oblique subtext. 

Flare Path

Rattigan's famous play concerns Patricia's love for a film actor, despite her marriage to Flight-Lieutenant Teddy Graham. Going to the hotel to break with Teddy, followed by Peter, Pat encounters Doris, married to a Polish Count, who is one of two pilots not to return from a bombing raid.

Cause Célèbre

A woman and her lover, a man 20 years her junior, stand trial for the murder of her husband in Terence Rattigan's incendiary recreation of the infamous case of Alma Rattenbury and 18-year-old George Percy Stoner.

The Winslow Boy

Inspired by an actual event, Rattigan’s hit 1946 play concerns a father's desperate efforts to clear his son's name when the boy is expelled from the Royal Naval College for allegedly stealing a five-shilling postal order.

The Browning Version

In Rattigan's celebrated play, teacher Andrew Crocker retires after 18 years as a classics professor at an English boys' school, forcing a reevaluation of his past, his marriage and his future.

While the Sun Shines

"A gay drawing-room comedy has come romping to the rescue of the faltering season." - The New York Herald-Tribune

Harlequinade

One of two Shakespearean ham actors touring the provinces has a dubious and shady past. Presented on Broadway with The Browning Version…

French Without Tears

This comedy by the author of Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy premiered in London with Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard and Jessica Tandy in the cast. At a villa on the South Coast of France, a group of young men are being coached in French by a gentleman and his daughter, Jacqueline…

Who Is Sylvia?

Obsessed with a girl called Sylvia, whom he met just once at a garden party when he was 17, Mark makes a habit of pursuing physically identical girls for the rest of his life - despite having a wife and growing son. We meet him - and Oscar, his fello…

Love in Idleness

Buoyant Michael returns home from Canada brimming with leftwing ideals only to discover his mother romantically embroiled with a hardline Tory. Loosely based on the story of Hamlet, this is the reworked version of 'Less Than Kind'.

A Bequest to the Nation

A Bequest to the Nation is a 1970 play by Terence Rattigan, based on his 1966 television play Nelson (full title - Nelson - A Portrait in Miniature).

A Tale of Two Cities (Gielgud/Rattigan)

One of the darkest and most romantic of Dickens' novels, A TALE OF TWO CITIES was adapted for the stage by the dream-team of Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud.

Adventure Story

The Pythia had warned Alexander that only self-conquest could fit a man to conquer the world.

Before Dawn

An hilarious retelling of the play and opera Tosca, with Scarpia as a swaggering villain who proves to be impotent, Tosca as a proud beauty and a Captain who gets confused as to whether Scarpia means that Tosca's lover should really be executed ... o…

In Praise of Love

"Well crafted." - Hollywood Reporter

Deception is the linchpin of this sophisticated comedy drama about a fatally ill wife and her ineffectual husband that starred Rex Harrison and Julie Harris on Broadway. …

Less Than Kind

Michael, eighteen, returns to wartime London from schooling in Canada, brimming with youthful left-wing convictions. Reunited with his mother Olivia, he is alarmed as he begins to realise that she is the mistress of Sir John Fletcher, a leading member of the war cabinet. Sparks fly between the idealistic young man and the pragmatic politician, while Olivia is torn between them. Less Than Kind is Rattigan's first version of this comedy, but was never staged and never published until 2011, the centenary of his birth. Instead it was substantially rewritten at the behest of the Lunts, who were to star in the premiere production, and it opened in the West End in 1944 as Love In Idleness. This volume presents both plays in full so that readers may judge for themselves which is the better.

Man and Boy

"I heard the name Bernard Madoff spoken more than once at intermission in the lobby of the American Airlines Theater, where Maria Aitken's revival of Terence Rattigan's 1963 drama Man and Boy opened on Sunday night.

Ross

This biographical portrait of T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) begins in 1922, when Lawrence was hiding under an assumed name as "Aircraftman Ross" in the Royal Air Force, with flashbacks to the famed Arab Revolts, beginning during World War I, in mid-1916.

Table by the Window

At the South Coast Hotel Beauregarde, sparks fly between a down-at-the-heels journalist and his ex-wife, a former model who provoked him to the violent act that sent him to prison.

Table Number Seven

The typical South Coast Hotel Beauregarde is peopled by the old, the lonely and the indigent. The manageress, Miss Cooper, is unable to remain aloof from their troubles. In Table No. 2 Major Pollock and Miss Railton-Bell are misfits and their despair…

The Sleeping Prince

Variation On A Theme

Inspired by La Dame aux Camelias, and set amidst the glamorous and exotic society of the 1950s French Riviera, Variation on a Theme revolves around the tempestuous love affair between Rose, a beautiful and worldly socialite, and Ron, a young ballet dancer with a keen eye for social advancement.