By Mursi Saad El-Din Old people seem to live on memories of the past. Nostalgia is an important part of their lives. A passing reference to something seemingly casual can bring back the whole past, with its woes and pleasures, hopefully the latter. A news item tucked in the corner of a page can evoke a sequence of memories elbowing each other to the forefront of the mind. What lends these memories a kind of permanence is determined by the richness of the life lived: I am lucky to have led a moderately rich and multi-coloured life, what with the dozen and one different posts I occupied and my wide ranging travels. There is scarcely a country that I have not visited, from the grasslands of Mongolia to those of Kenya, with Europe and America thrown in between. Of course I have my favourites among these memories and it is my 12 years in London that come out top. I arrived in London in 1945, a young man of 23, and left it in 1956, a 35 year-old middle-aged man. Those 12 years were ones of learning and of initiation into art and culture at their best. Of course my studies at the Department of English Language and Literature at Fouad I (now Cairo) University gave me some grounding in English drama, poetry and life, but it was mainly theoretical knowledge. Once in London I had the opportunity of seeing things in the flesh. And I relished it. It was immediately after the end of World War II, when London was the throbbing heart of world culture and a showcase for all that was best in European and American music, classical ballet and modern dance. It was, though, in the domain of theatre that London genuinely excelled. Classics were produced: Shakespeare, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Chekov, alongside plays by young playwrights like Christopher Fry, Terrence Rattigan, Noel Coward, Peter Ustinov, John Osborne, Harold Pinter and, from America, Arthur Miller and others. These memories came racing back to my mind when I read that there is a revival of Rattigan's plays. I remember watching his plays Separate Tables and The Deep Blue Sea in London. Now, 25 years after his death, Rattigan is back after a period of neglect. His play The Winslow Boy is touring the provinces in preparation for a London season. The Browning Version is expected in the new year while After the Dance is already playing, according to the theatre director Dominic Dromgoole, "to packed and surprised houses". He goes on to remark that this production constitutes "a remarkable resurgence for a writer who almost suffered a fate of complete oblivion". Rattigan will probably not go down in the annals of the English theatre as a great dramatist, but he certainly had a perfect technique. He is a master of narrative and in his plays, at least the ones which I saw, he displayed a distinct social and political concern which reflected, like Chekov, an understanding of how social tensions impact on private lives. One important characteristic of Rattigan's plays, according to Dromgoole, is that they "offer a prolonged examination of an old fashioned concept: virtue. Throughout his plays there is a consistent testing of what virtue is, and of how it survives in action." I remember how impressed I was, watching Separate Tables, by the delicate portrayal of tolerance within a given community, how its values are first endangered and then survive. Dromgoole concludes by writing that: "Small acts of mercy pepper his work... mercy, tolerance, courage, self-sacrifice, independence, patience. They are different virtues for different characters in a different England: the community-based, gradualist virtues that used to glue the country together, virtues that were swept away by the whirlwind of Mrs Thatcher." "When the audiences get swept up in a nostalgic glow at a Rattigan play," he goes on to say, "it is not for the tea sets or the pencil skirts. It is for a different quality of life."
