The Browning Version
****
Swansong
**

There can be few English institutions more mysterious to the uninitiated than the public school (now a misnomer), and Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version evokes its creaky protocols and ruthlessness in a manner that, against expectation, seems no less trenchant today than it must have done when the play premiered more than 60 years ago.

Andrew Crocker-Harris is a senior master on the brink of leaving his job at a smart boarding school to go and teach in a crammer. Afflicted with a heart condition, goaded by a viciously snobbish wife, who is dallying with one of his junior colleagues, and oppressed by the memory of having once been a stellar classical scholar, he is the epitome of the teacher whose unappreciated efforts have led to pedantic self-loathing.

Crocker-Harris is doomed to mediocrity by nothing more than a couple of bad choices and a stoical sense of duty. But his relegation to the Siberia of pedagogy is there for all to see: his colleagues can commend him on little except his planning of the school timetable.

As this husk of a man Peter Bowles gives a fine, economical performance. He is supported by a nimble cast: Candida Gubbins stands out as his desultorily cheating wife, and James Laurenson as the pompously evasive headmaster.

For Bowles and Laurenson it is the second outing of the evening; Rattigan’s small masterpiece is preceded in this double-bill by Chekhov’s Swansong, a slight play which reputedly took little more than an hour to write.

Here Bowles is Svetlovidov, a veteran actor who blunders back on stage after a benefit performance, drunkenly complaining that “It’s a terrible thing to be alone.” But he is not alone: soon enough he has Nikita the prompter (Laurenson) to bombard with his invective and vignettes of theatre’s greatest roles.

Svetlovidov refers to acting as “hamming it up”, and although Bowles avoids ham there’s a certain crudity in the character’s oscillation between delight in his genius and horror at his degeneration. This playlet is far removed from Chekhov’s best work.

Fortunately, The Browning Version provides a more subtle anatomy of failure. Peter Hall’s poised production, fluently played out on Christopher Woods’s superbly detailed set, reveals the layers of resonance in Rattigan’s writing. The strangled sounds of domestic unhappiness are, as Crocker-Harris comments, “usually a subject for farce” but here they sustain quiet tragedy.