After the Dance (play)
play written by Terence Rattigan
After the Dance is a play by Terence Rattigan which premièred at the St James's Theatre, London, on 21 June 1939. It was not one of Rattigan's more successful plays, closing after only sixty performances, a failure that led to its exclusion from his first volume of Collected Plays. Critics have tended to attribute this relative contemporary failure to the play's darkness which may have reminded audiences of the approaching European war.
However, the 2010 revival of the play was a commercial and critical success with The Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington stating that Thea Sharrock's production starring Benedict Cumberbatch confirmed that Rattigan is one of the "supreme dramatists of the 20th century".
Summary
David and Joan Scott-Fowler were 'bright young things' of the 1920s, whose ambition is to treat everything as trivial and to live lives of pure sensation. They always maintained that they married for amusement and not for love. However, Helen Banner, a serious young woman, has fallen in love with David and is determined to change his lifestyle, free him from Joan, stop him from drinking and re-awaken the serious historian in him. Unfortunately, Joan does indeed love David very deeply and is trapped by her posture of carelessness. At a party they are holding, Joan is bruised by the clash between private agony and public joy and she kills herself. The characters are shattered by the revelation and even though David and Helen plan to get away from this life, the play ends with a clear sign that David will continue as he did.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “After the Dance (play)” is play written by Terence Rattigan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dance, play and written, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “play written by Terence Rattigan” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4690625. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1939 and 2010.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “After the Dance (play)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.