Separate Tables
Delbert Mann (1958)
Terence Rattigan described Aunt Edna, his personification of the theatre audience he always kept in mind, as a ‘nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and money to help her pass it, who resides in a West Kensington hotel’. According to the BFI programme note, Rattigan’s mother Vera really did come to live in a Kensington hotel and the residents there inspired her son’s pair of one-act plays Separate Tables (1954), although the Beauregard Hotel in the plays (and this screen adaptation) is located not in London but in Bournemouth, that traditionally favourite destination for well-heeled senior citizens. The BFI note (an extract from Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson’s biography of Rattigan, published in 1979, just two years after his death) also suggests that the relationship of the sexually repressed spinster Sibyl Railton-Bell and her domineering mother in Separate Tables can be seen as ‘an extreme reshaping of Rattigan’s relationship with his own mother’. It’s hard to avoid seeing in all this too a close kinship between Aunt Edna and Vera Rattigan; hard to avoid wondering if Rattigan’s tendency – in evidence in Separate Tables even more strongly than in The Browning Version – to avert the bleak ending he seems to be heading for was in deference to (or in fear of) his real mother as much as his symbolic aunt. Aunt Edna wasn’t a figment of Rattigan’s imagination, either. In NFT2 you could hear her inane chuckles at the ‘humorous’ bits of Separate Tables, her little oohs and aahs at the ‘dramatic’ bits. I’m not sure either that Aunt Edna’s unmarried. At any rate, there were Uncle Arnolds making similar noises. It was quite an elderly audience but most of these people would have been in their twenties (or younger) when Separate Tables was first staged and Delbert Mann’s film came out. What are they nostalgic for? Every military expression of the bogus soldier Major Pollock, every word and gesture of the comically brusque waitress in the hotel restaurant was lapped up by the audience. It all reminded me of our friend Pat, who once told Sally she thought plays used to be more enjoyable when they featured servants.
The two parts of Separate Tables in the theatre are ‘Table by the Window’, about the relationship between (according to Wikipedia) ‘a disgraced Labour politician and his ex-wife’, and ‘Table Number Seven’, set about eighteen months after the events of the first play, which describes the friendship of the spinster Sibyl and the retired army officer Pollock. In the screenplay for the film, which Rattigan wrote with John Gay, the divorced husband and wife are Americans, the unmarried lady and the army man remain, and the action, alternating between the two relationships, is continuous – beginning just before dinner in the hotel one evening and ending after breakfast the following morning. It seems to be assumed that the cinema audience needs not only the same characters throughout but a continuous supply of dramatic highlights. This commercial anxiety actually results in a narrative more stagebound than the plays’ original construction suggests. Worse, the people in this film aren’t borne along by the flux of events (the way that Andrew Crocker-Harris is, once the screen version of The Browning Version gets going). The narrative is arrhythmic: it stops for the actors to act out their crises before moving on. The engineered melodrama and an inescapable awareness of the people on screen as stage creations undermine what Rattigan and Delbert Mann were presumably aiming at – giving us a sense of witnessing the tragedies of quiet lives, of naturally undemonstrative people.
Rattigan’s latterday reputation seems to depend very largely on the fact of his own closeted homosexuality and the extent to which protagonists in his plays are surrogate gay characters and their situations a cryptic account of homosexual predicaments. In Separate Tables, Major Pollock is terrified of what will happen when the other hotel residents read the local paper to discover that he’s been given a suspended sentence after groping half a dozen women in the local cinema. (I assume it’s groping: Rattigan’s language is so discreet that it’s not easy to work out what ‘making a nuisance of himself’ actually means, or if ‘nudging’ the women in the seats next to him is meant to signify something worse.) The queer interpretation of Rattigan’s work is hardly surprising, and doesn’t even need to be retrospective, in the case of Separate Tables. In the Broadway version (because America had no Lord Chamberlain?), Pollock’s shameful secret was changed from furtive heterosexual fumbling in public places to some kind of homosexual activity. And there is substance in the character of the hotel manager Pat Cooper, whose livelihood depends on discretion and keeping her own feelings under wraps, and in the writing of the exchanges between Pollock and Sibyl – a substance missing from the unarguably straight relationships, including that of the American pair. I don’t know the nature of the politician’s ‘disgrace’ in the stage play but his equivalent here, John Malcolm, is a weak, vague role. Malcolm drinks too much and has a tendency to thump women and, like most of the residents, is holed up in the Beauregard ‘in hiding’ from himself: there’s not much more detail than that. He’s interesting only to the extent that Pat Cooper is in love with him – and because Wendy Hiller in that role is able to suggest Miss Cooper’s resignation that Malcolm will do (what she regards as) the conventional thing and return to his ex-wife.
Separate Tables has a sort of happy ending but did Rattigan really think most people so tolerant and forgiving that they would, soon and easily, come round to treating Major Pollock decently and compassionately? The answer surely is no – if he had done, why would he have seen this as a subject for drama? – but the BFI extract from the Darlow-Hodson biography may be illuminating about how his mind worked in this respect. According to Darlow and Hodson, Rattigan based Major Pollock’s situation on the publicity given to John Gielgud’s being charged with and fined for a homosexual offence in 1953. The story broke in The Daily Express a few days before Gielgud was due to open in an N C Hunter play in Liverpool. The theatre management received threatening phone calls and there were fears of some kind of audience demonstration but the play and Gielgud went ahead:
‘Rattigan was very moved: ‘He had enough courage to go on and the audience had enough grace and sympathy to accept him purely as an actor. … The acceptance by these very ordinary people of something about which they had little understanding was very moving. In these people there was a strong feeling of humanity.’’
The first thing that strikes you about these remarks is that they’re awesomely condescending: ‘very ordinary’ is presumably a comment about the Liverpool audience’s social class or education or, more likely, a conflation of the two – an indication that Rattigan simply assumes the lower orders to be poorly educated. But, as I reflected on this quote, I became increasingly baffled as to what Rattigan meant. What was it the Liverpool audience couldn’t be expected to understand – homosexuality or an N C Hunter play? Is Rattigan really suggesting that ‘very ordinary people’ spent money on seats with the intention of booing when Gielgud appeared on stage – but, when he did appear, found themselves overcome by their better natures? It seems much more likely that they were people interested in theatre and who went hoping to see a famous actor performing live in a piece by a well-known, currently popular writer. In which case, the audience would be predisposed to accepting Gielgud ‘purely as an actor’.
The ‘acceptance’ of Major Pollock in Separate Tables is almost completely the reverse situation of the above. It’s true he is an actor too but he’s a very bad one: Pollock’s not a major at all (some of the other hotel residents have seen through the pretence well before it’s fully exposed). He’s a second lieutenant who got a commission only through his military father’s pulling strings – he never saw active service. In other words, he’s revealed to be a fantasist who tries it on with women in the local cinema. The people at the Beauregard accept him on these terms – as a human being. Rattigan is kidding himself in seeing this as analogous to the Liverpool audience concentrating on Gielgud as an actor (and being able, while doing so, to ignore what they may not have liked about him as a man). It’s very understandable that Rattigan was personally moved (and relieved) to find that the theatregoing public was ready to admire Gielgud’s artistry and to overlook his gayness. But it was either wishful or evasive thinking on Rattigan’s part to distort what happened to Gielgud in Liverpool as a means of engineering a hopeful conclusion to his own play.
Rattigan sets things up to expose the hypocrisy and intolerance of the conventionally-minded guests then pulls back from the brink so that there’s really just the one nasty of piece of work, Mrs Railton-Bell, who tyrannises her daughter and who –not least because Sibyl has a crush on him – leads the campaign to get Pollock chucked out of the hotel when his misdemeanour comes to light. The irony is that Gladys Cooper, who plays Mrs Railton-Bell, gives the most satisfying performance in the film. No doubt some of the audience derived a nostalgic pleasure from this monstrous snob but Gladys Cooper doesn’t at all encourage this. She doesn’t distance herself from the character; she plays it straight – as a result, she’s also horrifyingly funny. I laughed aloud (and alone) when Mrs Railton-Bell said to Sibyl, who’s protesting that it’s ages since she ‘got into a state’: ‘But you need to understand, dear, there’s a difference between not having hysterical fits and being able to hold down a regular job’. For the most part, I preferred the playing of the smaller parts to that of the main ones: these minor roles may not be up to much but Felix Aylmer, Cathleen Nesbitt and Rod Taylor (against considerable odds, especially with as dreary a partner as Audrey Dalton) all do well, and May Hallatt is such a genuinely odd presence that she makes the conventionally eccentric Miss Meacham a stronger character than Rattigan deserves. The ineffable waitress Doreen is played by Priscilla Morgan.
David Niven won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrait of Major Pollock. It seems astonishing (not least because the role, in terms of screen time, is not a large one) but I guess this was one of the Academy’s regular aberrations when an established star shows s/he really can act seriously – even though the acting is less than great. Niven – keen to take his big histrionic chance – is much less emotionally expressive than in, say, A Matter of Life and Death (where he doesn’t seem to be trying). He gives a conscientious but shallow performance. Deborah Kerr acts with feeling as Sibyl, although she’s rather easily cast as this neurotic, mousy spinster and her intensity exposes the falsity of Rattigan’s mechanics: you don’t believe that someone as overwhelmed as Sibyl is by the Major’s indiscretion could so easily forgive and forget when the plotting requires this. Wendy Hiller is a good deal more nuanced than any of the other principals (she won an Oscar too, for Best Supporting Actress). The American stars are odd presences here. As John Malcolm, Burt Lancaster, who co-produced, at least has a good entrance and gives the film a breath of life when he comes in through the French windows, alcohol on his breath and mud on his shoes. Rita Hayworth, as his estranged wife, is hard to read: this could be the result of nervous imprecision but the effect is a good deal more winning than in Pal Joey the previous year. The piece takes its ironic title from the Beauregard Hotel’s advertising: what’s promoted as an attraction of the place comes to signify the sad solitariness of each of the hotel guests (and presumably the human condition). The opening credits indicate a theme song although I heard no sound of it.
28 April 2011