Campaign to honour Sir Terence Rattigan amid writer’s revival - Theatreland urged to name venue after popular playwright

Published: 07 January 2011
by JOSH LOEB

ONE of the most popular dramatists of the last century could be the latest playwright to have a West End theatre named after him.

Sir Terence Rattigan, who died in 1977 and whose works include The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea, achieved fame while still in his 20s.

At one point in the 1940s he had three plays running almost side by side in Shaftesbury Avenue – a record only topped by Somerset Maugham.

This year marks the centenary of his birth and productions of several of his dramas – including his rarely seen play Cause Célèbre – are set to be staged at major London playhouses over the coming months.

An “unseen” Rattigan play, Less Than Kind, will get its premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre in Piccadilly later this month almost 70 years after it was written.

And author Geoffrey Wansell, Rattigan’s official biographer, wants the playwright to be immortalised in his “spiritual home” of Shaftesbury Avenue.

He said: “Rattigan was a Shaftesbury Avenue playwright, so one of the theatres there would be ideal, but one has to be happy with what one can get. 

“There is a new-found interest in Rattigan, with a new film version of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weiss and Simon Russell Beale, coming out this year. He is genuinely comparable to Chekhov. As a man who could chart the pain of love and loss I think he is without any comparison.”

There are already London theatres named after Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, and Mr Wansell has written to ­several West End theatre owners including Sir Stephen Waley Cohen and the Ambassador Theatre Group informing them about his campaign.