I finally got around to watching Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1951), on the strong recommendation of trusted friends and Mbird co-contributors. I had seen the David Mamet-directed(!) version of Rattigan’s Winslow Boy many years ago, and it has always been one of my favorites. But The Browning Version blows it out of the water – people, put this film on your Netflix queue now! To say that it illustrates pretty much all of the themes that we love to explore on this site – death and resurrection, judgment and love, grace in relation to human bondage/suffering, yes even Law and Gospel – would be reductive. It’s simply a beautiful and profound work of art, from top to bottom, with an especially astounding performance from Michael Redgrave. And if the final scene does not leave you in tears, I’m not sure I want to know you…
Another unequivocal Rattigan masterpiece is “The Deep Blue Sea”, first performed March 6, 1952, and made adapted for the screen twice [ed. update: once in 1955 and once in 2011]. The play begins with Hester Collyer being discovered by her neighbors following a failed suicide attempt. Some time before, Hester had left her husband, a respectable judge, for a semi-alcoholic former RAF pilot. Their relationship was passionate but Hester’s neediness soon overwhelms her lover, and he bolts, leaving her stranded and desperate. Her only solace comes in the form of another resident of the tenement house, the kindly gambler (and fellow sufferer) Mr. Miller. Both of the following excerpts come from Act III, and the first may sound familiar to some of you:
HESTER (wildly) How do I know what’s true. I only know that after tonight I can’t face life any more…. How can anyone live without hope?
MILLER. Easily. To live without hope can mean to live without despair.
HESTER. Those are just words.
MILLER. … (He twists her roughly round to face him. Harshly) Your Freddie has left you. He’s never going to come back again. Never in the world. Never.
(HESTER wilts at each word as if it were a physical blow)
HESTER (wildly) I know. I know. That’s what I can’t face. (She breaks away from Miller, falls on her knees across the downstage end of the sofa in a paroxysm of grief, burying her head in her arms)
MILLER (with brutal force) Yes, you can. (He moves above Hester and stands over her) That word “never”. Face that and you can face life. Get beyond hope. It’s your only chance.
HESTER. What is there beyond hope?
MILLER (after a pause) Life….
A little while later:
Miller: … And you alone know how unequal the battle has always been that your will has had to fight.
Hester: ‘I tried to be good, and failed.’ Isn’t that the excuse all criminals make?
Miller: When they make it justly, it’s a just excuse.
Hester: Does it let them escape their sentence?
Miller: Yes, if the judge is fair — and not blind with hatred for the criminal — as you are for yourself.
COMMENTS
13 responses to “What Is There Beyond Hope? Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (and The Browning Version)”
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I personally vouch for The Browning Version.
I really want to watch that movie, but now, thanks to DZ, I feel judged if I don't cry 🙂
Chop onions close to the end.
Very interesting Dave, I love this little post. Rattigan seems to be a tremendously complicated individual and this scene in particular was probably a bit of a catharsis for him…on the surface, the dialogue strikes me as an apology for Stoicism, but given the background of each character (not to mention Rattigan), I'm sure there is much more involved here than just 'living above the emotional' (as if!). It is quite crushing isn't it–the way Miller is offering the only advice that seems to make sense of his personal crisis? :-/
Anyway, if you get a minute, I'm sure we'd all like to hear a couple sentences with your own take on what makes the scene/play so powerful.
Totally unrelated, but have you seen the trailer for Spike Jonze's new short, 'I'm Here'? Looks like a splendid way to spend a 1/2 hour!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8vWcLJYXI
The Browning Version got me close to tears in at least three places. And I watched it on a laptop, and I almost never have that kind of reaction to films.
There are maybe a dozen or so movies that I love almost more than life itself. The Browning Version is one of them.
I am delighted to know that exhortations ("Watch this Dave!") sometimes really do produce their desired effect. 🙂
Also nice that Dave smuggles in a plug for the movie version of The Winslow Boy. Mamet not only directed it but also wrote the screenplay adaptation as well — you can hear the cadence of Mamet's poetry in the movie. Mamet has also done wonderful translations of Chekhov: Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard.
You'll note if you look closely at the DVD image Dave posted, that The Browning Version is now part of The Criterion Collection, which as we have mentioned before on MB is the gold standard of film snobbery. So is my favorite film by Mamet — HOMICIDE — which had been unobtainable for many years.
I think there's probably a lot to say about Rattigan's work in Mockingbird perspective.
His "Table Number 7", which is act two of "Separate Tables" — and for which David Niven won an Oscar in the filmed version — is a triumph of forgiveness credibly portrayed. I recommend that one highly.
After that might come "Sir Terence"'s last stage play, entitled "In Praise of Love". So much grace that it is almost unbearable, and in a real situation. (The play is based on the illness of the actress Kay Kendall, who was married to Rex Harrison — and I think Rattigan may even be a character in the play.)
This work is not in the genius category of Charles Dickens, but almost every play of Rattigan's portrays a small-step and therefore credible victory of grace in relation to love gone awry in personal or domestic life.
"The Browning Version" and "The Deep Blue Sea" are still the high points, though.
Finally, Vivien Leigh played 'Hester', the principal character of "The Deep Blue Sea", in the film of it.
It's not available on DVD. Rattigan thought that the director, Anatole Litvak, had made some changes of which he disapproved.
D-
I would say this:
I have found that in difficult situations, my inclination is to use "hope" to suppress the actual feeling of pain. To conjure up some reason to deny the nature of what I'm really feeling (because it is too painful), often dressed up in Christian language. When the path to healing, descriptively-speaking (as well as experientially-speaking), takes one straight into the pain. Without hedging one's emotional bets or seeing it as a means to an end. As the theology of the Cross would attest (John 19)… Rattigan knows this instinctively – it is simply the way life works.
Of course, the second this kind of death/resurrection becomes a prescription it fails (or at least, it ceases to be death/ resurrection). So I see this scene as anything but stoic – after all, what is more difficult or "active" than facing/feeling one's pain?! It is a lot easier said than done.
So this scene has enormous profundity (and abreactive explosiveness) in describing a scene where such a thing takes place. Not all of us have Millers in our lives – but a good therapist can be invaluable in this respect.
What does Eliot say in "East Coker"?
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."
Those are my two cents.
p.s. the Browning Version is another parable/illustration of this process, albeit with unexpected relational grace as the engine of resurrection for someone who died – emotionally – long ago. the irony is that i find it all profoundly hopeful.
Used this in my sermon last Sunday. People seemed to really appreciate the idea that God's life for us exists at the point where our own ideas of hope die. Hope tends to be a surprise (i.e., like the occurance of forgiveness), no?
Can someone tell the source in the play of a quote something to the effect that “God looks afar with pleasure on the humble schoolteacher”? In The Browning Version.
The quote is from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon itself.