London's Lightfoot Lad

Terence Rattigan was just 24 when he sold his first play. It was a fribble thing called French Without Tears, but the customers liked it. A smash hit, it ran for 1,030 performances in London (1936-39), 111 in New York (1937).

His next two plays were flops. Then war came, and Rattigan joined the R.A.F. He spent much of the next five years on North Sea air patrol.

Betweentimes he scripted one of Britain's best wartime films, The Way to the Stars, and wrote three more hit plays--each about as bright and empty as an electric-light bulb. Flare Path (1940) played more than 600 performances;

While the Sun Shines is still running in London after more than 1,000 performances; Love in Idleness, renamed O Mistress Mine and starring Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne, is now a Broadway sellout.

Last week, a few doors down Shaftesbury Avenue from While the Sun Shines, London playgoers were seeing a new Rattigan offering--and wondering what had come over the lightfoot lad of British show business. His new Winslow Boy was bright enough, but it had insides, too.

For plot, Rattigan had dug out of the Royal Navy's sea chest an old skeleton (the notorious Archer-Shee case of 1908, in which a naval cadet was falsely convicted of theft), and dressed it with care. His characters spoke their usual brittle, japanned British, but the effect was biting satire, not light comedy. As the surprise wore off, Londoners decided that they liked their Rattigan serious as well as flippant.

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