Cause Célèbre (or the things we do to each other)

Of all the juicy theatre I wanted to see, I did manage one: Cause Célèbre. It was a puzzling piece of theatre, much debated and deconstructed on the train home. Similar to Flare Path, I had to ask myself whether Rattigan was just labouring an obvious point or whether the real probing question was something quite different.


With Flare Path, I wondered whether the main theme was supposed to be loyalty and sacrifice - addressed in a plodding, simplistic manner int he script and the action - or whether it was a subtle exploration of the realities of marriage. Cause Célèbre contained a lot of overt pontificating about the prejudice against sexually awakened women, but was perhaps more interesting for its exploration of the nature of relationships as power struggles (although there was one instance of pontificating about this, which rather detracted from what would otherwise have been deliciously thought-and-discussion-provoking).

The first half was absorbing and very cleverly constructed. The audience was led between the past and the present - action and recollection - and left wondering what happened to Francis Rattenbury and whether Alma and George did murder him. The second half, rather disappointingly, answers all of our questions in a courtroom format which unfortunately lends itself to overt explanations and doesn’t allow the audience to reach its own conclusions. The courtroom situation is certainly an excellent device for enhancing suspense, but we are exposed to far too much of it on television, so the format felt a little tired.

Post-play discussion on the Southeastern Railway centred mainly around the two female characters and their parallels. It’s very neatly constructed: one woman had an affair with the seventeen-year-old household help, the other is smothering her seventeen-year-old son, who is fascinated by the idea of sex with an older woman. One is a free-spirited modern woman, on her third marriage to an older man, the other is conservative and repressed, but her marriage is crumbling and she doesn’t want to stop it. It does feel constructed, though, rather than organic. That is a criticism of both Rattigan plays I’ve seen this year. It feels as though he starts with a concept, then designs characters around his concept. What I love about the arts in general is that it luxuriates in flaws and contradictions, which only grow in really authentic characters.

One thing captured well was the sense of a 'time looking back on a time' and the timelessness of the issue of sex in relationships. Although I knew this before seeing the play, it was written in the late seventies, but based on a true story from the thirties. I imagine the passage of forty years would have contributed to a much more sympathetic treatment of Alma.


There is awkward humour in both Rattigan plays, too, which is brought into sharper focus in Cause Célèbre. The humour is set up right next to the most disturbing parts of the story, both easing the discomfort and adding to it with the realisation that you are laughing at a capital murder case. Rattigan is no Tennessee Williams, but both Cause Célèbre and Flare Path were compelling in their deceptive simplicity.