The Browning Version
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Terence Rattigan's play, The Browning Version, was first performed on September 8, 1948 at the Phoenix Theatre, London, in a joint performance with Harlequinade.
The play is about the last few days in the career of Andrew Crocker-Harris [played by Eric Portman], an old classics teacher at a British public school. The man's academic life is fading away following illness and he deeply feels how he has become obsolete. With his early retirement approaching, the headmaster informs him that the school will not give him his pension because of his early retirement, although he was depending on it and wishes for him to relinquish his place in the end-of-term speech giving to a popular sports master.
When Taplow [Peter Scott], a pupil who needs Crocker-Harris to pass him so he can go up to the next year, comes to him for help on his Greek, Crocker-Harris begins to show his true feelings.
Mr. Gilbert [Anthony Oliver], Andrew's successor at his teaching post, arrives to view the home of the Crocker-Harris'. He seeks advice on the lower fifth, the year Andrew teaches, and how to control them. Andrew begins to relate to Gilbert his own sad experiences, after Gilbert tells Andrew in a rather casual tone that the headmaster referred to him as the 'Himmler of the lower fifth'.
Crocker-Harris's wife, Millie [Mary Ellis], is being unfaithful to him with younger master Frank Hunter [Hector Ross], something that Andrew has been aware of, but has just been ignoring. After Taplow moves him by giving him an inscribed version of the Browning translation of the Agamemnon, he breaks down and admits to Frank that he knew about the affair and others. After Millie shows her callousness at Andrew's emotional state, Frank breaks off the affair with her and instead turns his sympathies to Andrew, his support giving Andrew the strength to break his mutually-destructive relationship with Millie.
As the play ends Crocker-Harris telephones the headmaster saying that he will make his talk at the prize giving, as is his right.
The "Browning Version" of the title is the reference within the story of Robert Browning's translation of the Greek tragedy Agamemnon. In the tragedy, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, aided by her lover. In the play, Crocker-Harris is spiritually dead, partly from spousal "soul murder," although the slaughter has been reciprocal, and his wife, Millie, can be viewed as possibly in worse shape. His "death" shows as extreme precision of word and manner, absence of emotional reaction, supercilious bullying of his students, and a cool, high-pitched, stilted, professorial approach to every circumstance. In essence, a "death" of emotion, in particular that of a capacity for empathy. Her "death" shows in a desperate search elsewhere for masculine love, and in harsh, hard, hostile, cold-blooded, humiliating attacks against her husband.
Although the name of the school is not given in the play, it is clearly Harrow School, something evident from the idiosyncrasies of the timetable that Crocker-Harris is in charge of writing.
In 1949 the play was performed on Broadway, opening on October 12 at the [now demolished] Coronet Theater on 49th street with Maurice Evans as Crocker-Harris and Edna Best as his faithless wife. However, the play [and its companion-piece Harlequinade] failed to find favor with the New York critics and closed after just 62 performances. Peter Scott[-Smith] as Taplow was the sole member of the West End cast to reprise his role on Broadway.
It was subsequently made into two film versions, and two made-for-television versions. The original 1951 film version, starring Michael Redgrave as Crocker-Harris, won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, one for Rattigan's screenplay, the other for Redgrave's performance. It was remade in 1994, starring Albert Finney, Greta Scacchi, Matthew Modine, Julian Sands and young Ben Silverstone. A British television version was made in 1955, starring Peter Cushing as Crocker-Harris. Another made for TV version in 1985 starred Ian Holm as the main character.
