SOURCE: Foulkes, Richard. “Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme.” Modern Drama XXII, no. 4 (December 1979): 375-82.

In the following essay, Foulkes explores Rattigan's recurring theme of the love triangle and its influence on his work.

In the preface to the second volume of his Collected Plays, Terence Rattigan recalls an early attempt at play-writing as a fourteen-year-old in a junior form at Harrow. The playlet was in French, and for it he was awarded two marks out of ten and the comment: “French execrable: theatre sense first class.” The youthful Rattigan's flair for dramatic effect is clear from the scenario which he recalled in later life: “I … plunged straight into the climactic scene of some plainly very turgid tragedy. The Comte de Boulogne, driven mad by his wife's passion for a handsome young gendarme, rushes in to the Comtesse's boudoir where she sits at her dressing-table having her hair...