When Academy Awardwinning actress Vivian Leigh visited Terence Rattigan’s Brighton home she was disgusted by the ruined Regency terrace she found.

The mess at 79 Marine Parade in Kemp Town was such, even its glamourous playwright owner could not find a single room he could sit in, never mind work.

Thus, despite the plaque bearing Sir Terence Rattigan’s name at the front of property, he spent little time there.

Neither did his friend Leigh.

Instead, Rattigan used the place to keep his final boyfriend occupied. Lovingly called “the Midget”

by Rattigan’s friends, Michael Franklin – handsome but scheming and 20 years younger – had a passion for interior design.

To save himself from Franklin’s screaming and hysterics, Rattigan indulged his lover’s enthusiasm: he gave him the home to renovate.

According to Nicholas Wright, the dramatist and former artistic director of the Royal Court, Franklin was as much a burden on Rattigan’s life as he was on his Brighton property.

“He seems to have been exploitative and made Rattigan’s life a misery.

“He was always threatening to jump out of the window or under a bus. It was very tiresome. Rattigan would buy these houses to give Franklin something to do.”

The two stayed together until Rattigan’s death in 1977, by which time the playwright behind The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea was pale and haggard due to leukaemia.

He died in agony, unable to move for the pain in his bones. A friend reported Rattigan uttered words from The Deep Blue Sea from his death bed.

“When you’re caught between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea can sometimes look very inviting.”

The lines, inspired by the suicide of the love of his life Kenneth Morgan – who had left Rattigan after struggling to adapt to his grand existence – were written by a man also tortured in life.

Rattigan lived in the metaphorical closet. His sexuality was hidden from the middle classes he entertained with longrunning money-spinning hits that ran and ran on West End stages.

He died an angry and embittered man as fashion and tastes changed. It was the arrival of the Angry Young Men, a gang led by realist John Osbourne, with his 1956 play Look Back In Anger, which marginalised Rattigan’s escapist technique.

“He was always very charming publicly, but within himself he was very angry,” says Wright.

“He used to drink a lot. He used to make this terrible mistake late at night, writing drunken letters to the critics who had given him bad reviews, explaining why he was right and they were wrong.”

All artists get bad reviews and Rattigan’s audience still loved his work. Even in 1960 when his biographical play about TE Lawrence, Ross, opened at the Haymarket Theatre Royal it ran for two years.

He would arrive to first nights in a Rolls Royce with beautiful young women on his arms. He remained, as always, exquisitely dressed.

“He was in many ways doing very well,” says Wright.

“But he was accustomed to being the golden youth of British theatre.

“The smartest, the coolest, the most fashionable thing, so when fashion didn’t love him any more, he was very upset.”

Wright is sharing his knowledge because he has written a play about Rattigan to celebrate the centenary of his birth.

The world premiere of Rattigan’s Nijinsky is one half of a pairing of plays (with The Deep Blue Sea) opening at Chichester Festival Theatre in July, running through September.

Aseries of talks with writers, biographers, directors and scholars, plus six rehearsed readings of Rattigan’s lesser-known plays, complete the “festival within the Festival”.

In Rattigan’s Nijinsky, Wright has re-energised an original screenplay written by Rattigan for the BBC in 1974 which was never produced. A noted screenplay writer whose work included the 1947 film version of Brighton Rock, Rattigan withdrew the screenplay with no explanation.

The script about Diaghilev – the genius impresario behind the Ballets Russes – and Nijinsky – the greatest dancer of all time – disgusted Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, who objected to it furiously.

“She said she would expose Rattigan as a homosexual,” explains Wright.

“He was terribly alarmed by this. Of course everybody knewhe was homosexual, but he just didn’t want to be exposed.”

The original screenplay was unique because it was the first explicitly gay piece Rattigan wrote.

Previously, any allusions to homosexuality or promiscuity were written into his work through allegory. That was because the Lord Chamberlain’s Office would censor any homosexual theme.

“If you wrote a gay play, it would have to be in a little club theatre somewhere,” says Wright.

“Rattigan liked to have long runs in West End theatres earning lots of money.”

Homosexuality, even between consenting adults in private, was also a criminal offence, which carried a prison sentence. Any scandal about Rattigan’s private life might ruin his reputation: the establishment figure who had been educated at Harrow school and produced safe, stiff-upper-lip plays.

Rattigan forced the BBC to withhold the play as long as Romola Nijinsky was alive.

“He was very proud of the play. He’d had possibly gay characters in plays before, but he’d never actually had a gay romance in a play before.

“I think he felt he was being very brave about it, but unfortunately he wasn’t brave enough.”

Wright, a ballet-lover like Rattigan, says the Oxford-educated dramatist was an effective, suave, engrossing storyteller. That made it enjoyable, even easy, to write the author back into his own play, a tactic almost unheard of.

“He’d done all the hard work really. He’d written the Nijinsky / Diaghilev story, so then I could write my stories of him, his mother, his producer, and have old Romola merging in and out of it, commenting and reacting.

“I didn’t have to organise the plot. Rattigan had done all that and of course he was very good at it.”

Wright has placed the action in a suite at Claridge’s with Rattigan at the end of his life, as he was when he wrote the screenplay.

“He is ill. He’s really dying. He is on pain-killing drugs which make him hallucinate.

“He is angry, cross and very resentful, because it is 13 years since he has had a success, which is how Rattigan was in real life.”

He felt a young generation didn’t respect him, he is frustrated and feels failure.

“He just wishes the pain would all go away.”

The mixture of reality and hallucination, as Rattigan watches his screenplay come alive while daydreaming across the globe, creates a surrealistic tragedy, bolstered by director Philip Franks’ decision to add dancers.

Wright says we see a man realising he has failed to achieve everything he wanted to achieve. However, he admits he wanted to copy Rattigan’s subversive style to make the switching of script-writers invisible.

“He was very good at writing emotional scenes but nobody mentions the emotion, or ever says anything exactly emotional, or what it’s about.

“It’s all under the surface. So there is a lot of heartbreak, let’s say, suggested very effectively and that’s his big characteristic – writing strong, powerful, messy emotions but not spelling them out.

“We can infer them, but only from what we see.”

* Starts 7.30pm, matinees 2.15pm. Tickets £14 to £35. Call 01243 781312.