French Without Tears: Rattigan’s Shavian Inheritance

Abstract

French Without Tears continues demonstrating Rattigan’s dramatic art, as will all subsequent chapters. Here I analyze Rattigan’s early critical and commercial success, French Without Tears, showing how it is underpinned by the myth of Diana and Actaeon and imitates Shaw’s Man and Superman, where the structure of comedy is varied by having the female pursue the male. Rattigan in this play reckons with his inheritance from Shaw by adapting Shaw’s reversed love chase, but Rattigan adds a homoerotic subtext foreign to Shaw. I also discuss the debate over the Play of Ideas conducted in 1950 in the New Statesman and Nation that Rattigan started and finished with several playwrights, including Shaw, who variously rebutted Rattigan’s argument that plays should be about character and situation rather than about ideas.