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The Browning Version
21 and 22 May 2005 |
- Play synopsis
- Background
- Cast & crew
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The memorable story of a student who inspires his brilliant yet beleaguered and unappreciated teacher. Andrew Crocker-Harris is belittled by his unfaithful wife, an object of ridicule by his pupils and betrayed by the school he has served for years. "The Crock" as his students call him, knows he isn't loved like the fictional Mr. Chips, but in the span of just over a day he is forced as Robert Burns would say, "to see ourselves as others see us." With quiet resolve Andrew comes to terms with the failure of his life. His much younger wife has come to the end of her frustration with his failure to rise in the teaching profession and becomes bitter when illness forces him to take early retirement. Life changes when one of his pupils presents hims with a translation of The Agamemnon by Robert Browning - The Browning version. This small act of kindness lets him see how he has never imparted to them his own love of the classics and he begins to reflect on the rest of his life his marriage and his career. |
Dave Simms and Alex King as Crocker Harris and Taplow |
The Browning Version is the play that secured Terence Rattigan’s reputation as a serious, mature playwright. It is viewed as one of his best works, and one of the best one-acts ever written.The play was first performed at the Phoenix Theatre, London, England, on September 8, 1948, and made its New York debut with Harlequinade on October 12, 1949, but only ran for sixty-two performances. While praise from British audiences and critics was nearly universal when the play was performed in England, American critics were generally not as kind to the Broadway version, perhaps due to the subject matter. Though only a one-act play, The Browning Version is a well-crafted and sympathetic psychological study. As John Russell Taylor writes in The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, ‘‘The Browning Version, as well as being at once Rattigan’s tightest, most natural-seeming construction job and his most deeply felt play, marks the beginning of his most distinctive and personal drama.’’ |
Julie Quick as Millie Crocker-Harris and Jonathan Webb as Frank Hunter
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Michael Baldwin Dr Frobisher Michael has had major roles in plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, Pinter, Stoppard, Handke, Arthur Miller and Caryl Churchill. |
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Angus Henderson Peter Gilbert Angus started acting in high school productions including The Tempest and Cosi and also took an interest in comedy and stand-up, performing in the National Schools Comedy Festival Class Clowns. |
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Alex King John Taplow Alex is in year 10 at Marryatville High School where he is studying Drama, Multi Arts and Theatre Tech. |
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Julie Quick Millie Crocker-Harris Julie has 25 years experience acting in South Australia. |
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Dave Simms Andrew Crocker-Harris Dave appeared in last year's 'simply-staged' production of Love Letters, and won accolades for his portrayl of musical-mad Buzz in our inaugrual production Love! Valour! Compassion! |
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Joanne Sutton Mrs Gilbert Joanne's background is in the genre of musical theatre and has appeared in Metropolitan Music Theatre's Bye Bye Birdie and Grease. |
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Jonathan Webb Frank Hunter Jonathan has been seen in plays and musicals around Adelaide for over five years, including shows for Burnside Players, Mayfair Theatre Company and the Adelaide University German Club. |
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Sally Putnam Director Sally directed Mixed Salad's award-winning and highly acclaimed production of Five Women Wearing the Same Dress last year. She also directed our 'simply-staged' show in 2004 Love Letters. |
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Alison Kershaw Stage Manager After completing BA (Hons) Arts and Education at the University of Leeds, England, Alison returned home to Adelaide. |
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Terence Rattigan was that relative rarity among the ranks of playwrights: a theater author who was almost equally successful as a screenwriter, and one of a very few playwrights privileged to adapt his own stage work to the screen. Rattigan's finest and most enduring work for the screen was probably The Browning Version, which had its roots in his time as a boy at Harrow in the mid-'20s, drawing on his memories of one cold, distant, dry-as-dust teacher of classical languages, and of another teacher to whom he was attracted romantically. Rattigan had the misfortune to come of age as a gay man in the England of the 1930s, when such matters were still criminalized and prosecuted; he had the good fortune, however, to be a man of the theater, the one respectable area of creative life that tolerated such relationships. He often dealt with his homosexuality by veiling it in his works; indeed, even First Episode, which was heavily censored for the stage, shocked people with its suggestions of homoerotic attractions among Oxford students. Rattigan would have his heroes involved in heterosexual relationships in his other works, as well, but often featured an unspoken bond and loyalty among men that stood in for his real meanings. It worked in getting the plays produced, and also in helped him write some dazzlingly complex and intense scripts. In The Browning Version, both play and film, there is no suggestion of homosexual attraction between the male characters, though there is a notion running through it that men can be truer, more loyal, and kind to each other and, in their way, more faithful and reliable than the women around them, even a spouse. (The film version has among its characters the most vicious theatrical wife this side of Lady Macbeth.) It's merely a hint or a suggestion, but it resides at the heart of the work. Ironically, when Mike Figgis remade the film in the much freer '90s, he wrung from his movie most of that veiled bond between the male characters -- Rattigan's play was credited as the source, when it was actually his screenplay that was the basis for the newer film. Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide |
Terence Rattigan
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Andrew Crocker-Harris is belittled by his unfaithful wife, an object of ridicule by his pupils and betrayed by the school he has served for years.
But as the embittered teacher confronts the wreckage of his marriage and career, his heart is touched by an unexpected act of kindness by a pupil.
Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version is the memorable story of a student who inspires his brilliant yet beleaguered and unappreciated teacher.
The work, described as one of the best one-act plays ever written, is being staged by award-winning Adelaide theatre company Mixed Salad Productions.
The special ‘simply staged’ show is being produced for one weekend only as a fundraiser for the company’s major 2005 production.
The Browning Version will be performed at The Promethean Theatre, 116 Grote St, Adelaide, on May 21 & 22, when details of the next major production will also be announced.
Terence Rattigan, author the The Winslow Boy and The Deep Blue Sea, has been described as a master of the well-made play.
One leading British theatre critic wrote that "few dramatists this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan".
A cast of Mixed Salad favourites star in this richly layered work of truth, tears and triumph. Dave Simms plays a brilliant but stern classics master at a posh prep school who is forced out of his job and into the realisation that he is despised in the classroom...and at home.
The proud academic is adrift...until one student's profound act of kindness helps to restores his crippled pride and sense of self.
“We’re calling this a “simply staged” production,” says director Sally Putnam. “Last year we found it was an excellent way for us to launch, and raise some much needed funds for, our next major production in the spring."
The Browning Version is on for two days only on Saturday May 21 and Sunday May 22 in the Promethean Theatre, 116 Grote Street, City.
Performances are at 7.30pm on May 21 and at 2.30pm and 6.30pm on May 22.
All tickets are $12.50, including refreshments.
Simply, subtly magnificent.
In 1948 The Browning Version cemented Terence Rattigan's position as a fine playwright. This version cements Dave Simms as a fine actor.
Mixed Salad's latest offering was a tour de force for this fledgling company and a triumph for Simms.
Produced and directed by both Simms and Sally Putnam with tenderness, it was untouched by the sentimentality into which it could so easily have slid.
A "simply staged production", two easy chairs, a book-strewn desk, a lamp and a table all worked admirably on the Promethean's pocket handkerchief of a stage.
Andrew Crocker-Harris is the classics master at a boys' public school. He is despised by his colleagues, mocked by his students, betrayed by his headmaster and cuckolded by his wife who taunts him mercilessly. But the moment one of his students (Taplow, played beautifully by Alex King) gives his master a Robert Browning translation of Agamemnon, the master is overcome with emotion by this simple, unexpected gesture of goodwill.
As Crocker-Harris, Dave Simms was simply, subtly magnificent. He has never been better as we shared his character's bitterness and stoicism in the face of those who humiliated him.
Simms was well supported with excellent ensemble work by a stellar cast; Jonathan Webb as the wife's current paramour, Michael Baldwin as the smiling villain of a headmaster and wife Julie Quick (albeit a little overdrawn at times).
Richard Lane, Encore Magazine, 3 June 2005