First Episode

Cast: 2f 6m

Staging: various interior settings, living room, bedroom, breakfast room - can be simply staged

Amateur rights performance fee: £85 per performance (plus VAT where applicable)

Paperback, 152 pages ISBN: 9781848421639Publication Date:
21 Jul 2011
Size: 197mm x 130mm£10.99 £8.79You save £2.20 (20%)
Ebook, 152 pages ISBN: 9781780017914Publication Date:
15 Sep 2016
£10.99 £8.79You save £2.20 (20%)
First Staged:
Q Theatre, Kew, 1933, then Comedy Theatre, London, 1934

First Episode

By Terence Rattigan and Philip Heimann

Paperback £10.99£8.79

Ebook £10.99£8.79

Terence Rattigan's first play, published for the first time in this edition to mark the centenary of his birth.

Written with his fellow student, Philip Heimann, while they were both at Oxford, First Episode shows an infatuated undergraduate, Tony, falling for Margot, an actress ten years his senior. And vice versa. Completing a triangle of rival affections is Tony's best friend, David.

Originally staged at a small experimental theatre in Kew in 1933, First Episode transferred to the West End and then to New York. Rattigan was twenty-two years old. Though not revived since then, it is a candidate – with its cast of eight – for rediscovery, much as was the now-feted After the Dance.

This edition in the Nick Hern Books Rattigan Collection includes an authoritative introduction by Rattigan scholar Dan Rebellato. 

Press Quotes

'Paints a fascinating picture of a vanished student world... Rattigan writes with great perception... shows that, even at 22, [Rattigan] was a born dramatist'

Guardian

'An astonishingly precocious work that displays youthful charm as well as sensitively exploring themes of unequal (if not unrequited) love and repressed emotion that became Rattigan trademarks'

Exeunt Magazine

Cast: 2f 6m

Staging:various interior settings, living room, bedroom, breakfast room - can be simply staged

Amateur rights performance fee: £85 per performance (plus VAT where applicable)

Paperback,152 pages ISBN: 9781848421639Publication Date:
21 Jul 2011
Size: 197mm x 130mm£10.99 £8.79You save £2.20 (20%)
Ebook,152 pages ISBN: 9781780017914Publication Date:
15 Sep 2016
£10.99 £8.79You save £2.20 (20%)

Also by Terence Rattigan:

Ross
French Without Tears
Who is Sylvia? and Duologue
Separate Tables
Who is Sylvia?
French Without Tears
Harlequinade & All On Her Own
Love in Idleness/Less Than Kind
Flare Path
Rattigan's Nijinsky
Cause Célèbre
After the Dance
Harlequinade
The Deep Blue Sea
The Browning Version
All On Her Own
The Winslow Boy
Duologue
In Praise of Love

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