"A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute"
About this Quote
Rattigan’s line isn’t romantic advice about “writing from the heart.” It’s a cool-headed reminder that theater is the most unforgiving art form because its consumers are literally trapped in the room with you. A novelist can ask for patience, hide a slow chapter inside private reading time, and trust momentum to recover. A playwright faces a live crowd with bodies, clocks, coughs, and exits. Lose them and you don’t just lose attention; you lose the event.
The first sentence, “A playwright must be his own audience,” is the tell. Rattigan is arguing for internalized spectatorship: the writer has to feel, in real time, when a beat drags or a reveal lands flat. It’s craft as empathy, but also as discipline. You can’t write theater like literature and hope performance will rescue it; performance exposes every indulgence. The subtext is almost moralistic: the playwright has a responsibility to strangers who paid, dressed, traveled, and agreed to sit still. Attention becomes a kind of contract.
Context matters. Rattigan built his reputation on tightly engineered “well-made” plays, often dismissed by postwar critics as too polished, too middlebrow, too concerned with audience comfort. This quote reads like his rebuttal and his confession. He’s not denying art’s complexity; he’s insisting that complexity has to arrive through minute-by-minute engagement. In a medium where silence is shared and boredom is contagious, pacing isn’t a technical detail. It’s the ethics of the room.
The first sentence, “A playwright must be his own audience,” is the tell. Rattigan is arguing for internalized spectatorship: the writer has to feel, in real time, when a beat drags or a reveal lands flat. It’s craft as empathy, but also as discipline. You can’t write theater like literature and hope performance will rescue it; performance exposes every indulgence. The subtext is almost moralistic: the playwright has a responsibility to strangers who paid, dressed, traveled, and agreed to sit still. Attention becomes a kind of contract.
Context matters. Rattigan built his reputation on tightly engineered “well-made” plays, often dismissed by postwar critics as too polished, too middlebrow, too concerned with audience comfort. This quote reads like his rebuttal and his confession. He’s not denying art’s complexity; he’s insisting that complexity has to arrive through minute-by-minute engagement. In a medium where silence is shared and boredom is contagious, pacing isn’t a technical detail. It’s the ethics of the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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