Terence Rattigan must have really liked this narrative device

I just watched the V.I.P.s on TCM for the umpteenth time, and this time I made a connection I had never made before. After Elizabeth Taylor's character reads the letter her husband has left for her, the Louis Jourdan character demands that she show it to him. He looks at it, says something like, "I can't read his handwriting", and asks her to read it to him. She then reads the letter aloud, which is how we in the audience find out what's in it.

Here's the connection: The screenplay for The V.I.P.s was written by Terence Rattigan, who also wrote a play called Flare Path, about RAF flyers in WWII. In the play, there's a Polish-born RAF flyer who leaves a letter for his English girlfriend in the event his plane is shot down. He writes the letter in French because his English isn't good enough to say what he wants to say, and he knows that no one would be able to understand a letter written in Polish, but he figures one of the other RAF guys would be able to translate a letter from French into English for the benefit of the girlfriend (an uneducated barmaid who doesn't read French herself). So when his plane is (spoiler alert) shot down, one of the other flyers has to read the letter aloud to the girlfriend, while simultaneously translating it from French into English, and that's how we in the audience find out what's in the letter.

The "reading a letter aloud to let the audience know what's in it" device is probably a trick that playwrights have been using for centuries, but I thought it was interesting that Terence Rattigan used it at least twice. (Actually, it may be three times -- Rattigan also wrote "The Deep Blue Sea", and there's a suicide note in that one which I think may be read aloud, but I'm foggy on the details.)