Hero as Riddle

Ross (by Terence Rattigan) is a deductive story about T.E. Lawrence. Playwright Rattigan deduces that Lawrence goaded himself to his heroic and legendary exploits as a leader of the Arab revolt in World War I to achieve a personal triumph of the will. Rattigan further deduces that when Lawrence was whipped, bayoneted and sodomized on the orders of a Turkish commander at Deraa, his will was broken in a traumatic moment of "self-knowledge": he recognized himself as a homosexual. His later enlistment in the R.A.F. as "Aircraftman Ross" was a way of blotting out his identity.

Thanks to Rattigan's theatrical flair and the lacerating honesty of John Mills's portrayal of Lawrence, the play carries one along with its promise of some ultimate disclosure of character. The central illusion holds: this could be Lawrence, this could be the Arabian desert. The high-noon blaze of Motley's desert scenes evokes a sandy inferno stretching to infinity, a landscape without perspective in which a man might take himself for a god. By contrast, the R.A.F. barracks are squatty, cramped, mind-dwarfing. But at play's end, this portrait of a hero turns out to have been persistently tantalizing as drama, never entirely convincing as logic, radically oversimplified as psychology.

Mills makes every nuance numinous, so that he seems to be in the hands of a destiny rather than a playwright. When he first dons the white burnoose of a princely Bedouin, he takes an almost womanish delight in his new finery. Swifter than thought, the mood changes, and the robes seem transformed into the priestly vestments of a man taking holy orders. Later, raising his slight, shattered body from the floor after sexual violation, Mills utters a howl which in its compressed agony echoes the primal curse of man. Robbed of all self-regard, his face whitens to despair as if it were daubed in the ashes of a cremated soul.

Rattigan and Mills thus create an absorbing Theory of Lawrence, but the play sometimes slithers toward schoolboy romantics and when-empire-was-in-flower nostalgia. No amount of skilled acting can wholly conceal that General Allenby (John Williams) is a stock pukka sahib, that the commander at Deraa (Geoffrey Keen) is a stock sweaty Turkish dog of a villain, and that Auda Abu Tayi (Paul Sparer) is a stock native chief, corrupt but endearing.

The riddle of the real Lawrence is a multiple-choice question, and Rattigan is entitled to his choice. What his play proves is that the nature of the hero resists the analyst's couch as it does dialectics or eugenics. Mystery is part of the substance, not the shadow, of genius.

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