The Browning Version And Harlequinade

 

By Terence Rattigan

 

Performed at the Plaza Theatre, Romsey on 5th to 9th November, 1991

 

The Browning Version

Cast In Order Of Appearance

John Taplow

Matthew Bence

Frank Hunter

Ian Morley

Millie Crocker-Harris

Mollie Manns

Andrew Crocker-Harris

Ken Spencer

Dr Frobisher

David Pike

Peter Gilbert

Simon Wills

Mrs Gilbert

Maria Hutchings

 

Harlequinade

Cast In Order Of Appearance

Arthur Gosport

David Bartlett

 Edna Sely

Philippa Tayler

Dame Maud Gosport

Hazel Burrows

Jake Wakefield

Ken Hann

George Chudleigh

Douglas Coates

1st Halberdier

Ian Morley

2nd Halberdier

Neville Green

Miss Fishlock

Christine Baker

Fred Ingram

John Carrington

Poppy

Dawn Finbow

Muriel Palmer

KateAtkinson

Tom Palmer

Kevin Spencer

Mr Burton

Graham Buchanan

Joyce Langland

Jane Royle

Policeman

Bruce Atkinson

Monks

Bruce Atkinson, Kevin Mitchell

 

For The Maskers

Directed by

Albie Minns

Assistant to The Director

Nichola Home

Stage Manager

Angie Barks

Assistant Stage Managers

Julia Campone, Tony Lawther

Set Design

Ron Tillyer

Set Construction

Chris Finbow, Ron Tillyer, Darryl Palmer, Brian Langford, Kevin Hughes

Set Painting

Edwin Beecroft

Set Dressing

Jan Ward, Jean Durman

Lighting Design

Clive Weeks

Assisted by

Ali Mountford

Properties

Ella Lockett, Jean Durman

Wardrobe

Helen Officer, Julie Zillwood, Angie Stansbridge, Lawrie Gee

Poster Design

Ken Spencer

Publicity

Michael Patterson

Front of House Coordinator

Belinda Drew

 

 

The Browning Version and Harlequinade (Playbill as the two one-actors were called) were revived in 1980 by the National Theatre. Many of Rattigan’s most convincing plays have a boy or young man, at a testing moment of life, at the middle of them. His need in the period after Oxford to justify his choice of career to his father by becoming a success seems to have left him with what we might be inclined to call an obsession with father-son relationships. In The Browning Version there is no father and son as such; instead, as a substitute father, we have the figure of the elderly schoolmaster on the point of retirement, Andrew Crocker-Harris. Taplow, the boy, needs the approval of “the Crock” (in order to get his remove), but so does “the Crock” need the admiraton of Taplow if his entire life is not to be pronounced a failure.

 

Rattigan was educated in the 1920’s at Harrow School where he was a classicist. He played cricket well and played in the Eton and Harrow match at Lords. This detail is all brought forward in time to cover the period in which the play was written. His insights of the play are such that it remains timeless and will, I hazard, outlast even the system of privileged private education and the compulsory study of classics on which it is founded.

 

Harlequinade, the original stable mate of The Browning Version, recalls his wartime provincial touring theatre. The play is rooted in those tatty tours that brightened many a blacked-out or austerity-grey evening, and it also contains a flashback to the author’s wider graduate acting experience; but the real subject is the Coward-like one that theatrical people are a happy breed set apart from ordinary mortals in their own sealed off world, subject to a different set of motivations from the rest of us. This was the only time he ever wrote a play about actors, and Dame Maud contains more than a suggestion of Dame Sybil Thorndike. Rattigan’s gift of invention and surprise was never more fluent.

 

Antony Curtis, Literary Editor of the London Financial Times and author of the studies of Maugham and Rattigan.