Plot
The play is about the last few days in the career of Andrew Crocker-Harris, an aging classics teacher at a British public school. The man's academic life is fading away following illness and he feels that he has become obsolete.
It starts when Taplow, a pupil who needs Crocker-Harris to pass him so he can go up to the next year, comes to him for help with his Greek, but Crocker-Harris is not in his rooms. Instead, Taplow meets Frank, another Master at the school. We find out (after Taplow leaves) that Hunter, and Crocker-Harris' wife, Millie, are carrying on an affair.
When Crocker-Harris returns, he first has the lesson with Taplow, where he begins to show his true feelings through his love for literature. Afterwards, the headmaster arrives to inform him that the school will not give him his pension because of his early retirement, though he was depending on it, and wishes him to relinquish his place in the end-of-term speech-giving to a popular sports master.
Mr. Gilbert, Crocker-Harris's successor at his teaching post, arrives to view the Crocker-Harrises' home. He seeks advice on the lower fifth, the year Crocker-Harris teaches, and how to control them. Crocker-Harris begins to relate to Gilbert his own sad experiences after Gilbert tells Crocker-Harris that the headmaster had referred to Crocker-Harris as the 'Himmler of the lower fifth'. Crocker-Harris, who did not realize he was feared by the boys, is very disturbed by this title.
Taplow returns, and moves Crocker-Harris by giving him an inscribed version of Robert Browning's translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, at which point he breaks down crying. Millie, his wife, shows her callousness at Crocker-Harris's emotional state by ruining this fond moment by implying Taplow only gave the gift to get the grades. Hunter breaks off the affair with her, instead turning his sympathies to Crocker-Harris. Crocker-Harris informs him that he knew of Millie's affair with Frank, as well as her previous ones, but despite this he does not wish to divorce her.
As the play ends, Hunter makes plans with a reluctant Crocker-Harris to meet him at his new place of work, and an uplifted Crocker-Harris telephones the headmaster saying that he will make his speech after the sports master, as is his right.
The 'Browning Version' of the title references the translation of the Greek tragedy given by Taplow, Agamemnon, in which Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, aided by her lover.
Although the name of the school is not given in the play, it is clearly Harrow School (which Terence Rattigan attended), something evident from the idiosyncrasies of the timetable that Crocker-Harris is in charge of writing.
Read more about this topic: The Browning Version (play)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)