Cause Célèbre: “Thank God for Peace at Last”

Abstract

By the time Rattigan writes his last play, he has come to view human relations in general and sexuality in particular as tragic, a closed circle within which people struggle to be happy, and fail. The title Cause Célèbre refers to the real case of Alma Rattenbury, whose young lover, George Stoner, brutally murdered her physically debilitated husband who cannot manage stairs (the last of Rattigan’s long line of wounded males). The play manages to change our early impressions of her as a coarse, lecherous alcoholic into our understanding of her as a warm, vital, loving woman trying to attain some happiness while deadened by an unhappy marriage. Rattigan adapts Alma’s actual last written communications to make them express his individual sense of tragedy: he adds language and images that enact her exhaustion and desperation. Rattigan changes the site of her suicide to a location where she and Stoner made love to imply that sexuality dooms one. He adds to her reflections the further suggestion that people will not let themselves see the beauty of the world because people do not know how to be happy in this world. As she is about to take her own life, she prays, “Thank God for peace at last,” echoing the last line of Ross, “God will give you peace.”