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Royal Theatre, Northampton - Friday
19th September to Saturday 4th October, 2003
Tickets: £5.00 to £27.00
Quartermaine's Terms takes place in
the
world of blackboards and chalk rubbers of the 1960s, but all is not
well in the staff room.
St John (pronounced 'Sinjon')
Quartermaine
is a teacher whose life is lived vicariously in the confines of a
staffroom in a Cambridge school for teaching English to foreigners. Set
in the 1960s, it deals with the concerns of seven teachers over several
years and in particular the progress of Quartermaine, a lonely man and
ineffective teacher.
Jonas plays new boy Derek
Meadle
How teaching has changed. Walk into many school staff rooms today and
you'll find stressed, overworked teachers biting their fingernails as
they contemplate new careers outside education.
Quartermaine's Terms, by Simon Gray, is set in the rarefied staff room
of a Cambridge language school in the early 1960s. It's like a cross
between a gentleman's club and a library.
But the staff are still stressed, not particularly with work but with
the strains of home life. We get glimpses of life outside the classroom
as each character - all of them teachers - chat about wives, husbands,
children, holidays and writing novels. Whilst all of them are good at
talking, none are good at listening. Stories are begun but we rarely
hear the endings. It's as if everyone is in their own little world.
Then there's St John Quartermaine. He's in a different world
altogether. He has no life outside school, and in school he has a very
relaxed attitude to teaching. He's often in the staff room before the
bell sounds. St John almost lives in a dream.
All is not well in the school. Things have to change. Even the foreign
students are challenging the way they're taught.
Quartermaine's Terms is a gentle, slow-moving drama with a few funny
moments, but the overall feeling is one of sadness.
There's good ensemble acting from all the cast. They include Rupert
Wickham as the likeable and bewildered Quartermaine, Jonas
Armstrong
as the accident-prone new boy, Derek Meadle, Timothy Davies is
excellent as the philosophical Henry Windscape and Ian Price is the
ebullient, bow-tie wearing Eddie Loomis. Simon Godwin directs this
first home-produced production of the new Autumn season at the Royal.
Quartermaine's
Terms By Simon Gray - Salisbury Playhouse
Review
by Kevin Catchpole (2003)
Simon Gray's Chekovian comedy Quartermain's Terms reveals the flip side
of the 1960s. No swinging here.
Full marks then to Simon Godwin whose production, which opened at
Salisbury Playhouse at the weekend, spurns any temptation to perk up
the seedy atmosphere of a third rate language school staff room with
easy knockabout laughs.
Staged in collaboration with the Northampton Royal and Derngate
Theatres, the production concedes rather than boasts a staff room in
David Farley's design reeking of faded tutelary. Here, from the depths
of a crumbling armchair, Rupert Wickham's St. John Quartermaine
passively surveys the lives of colleagues while his own career fades
sadly away, untroubled by anything remotely resembling ambition.
Cliché is all around, from the crisp superficiality of Ian
Price's deputy head Loomis to the eccentric old maid of Marty
Cruickshank's Melanie Garth. Except that the cliché is
pregnant
with the reality of wasted lives - Loomis is destined to lose the only
thing he cares for while Garth is about to commit the ultimate crime.
Against these depressing events, Jonas
Armstrong's intense young Meadle cheers us all considerably
while, long before Act 2, Josh Cohen has us taking bets on which
moustache he will wear next.
Sophie Shaw, too, as Anita, is a sight for sore eyes amidst so much
failure - and we mustn't overlook Timothy Davies' Windscape - as his
less fortunate colleagues do at their peril!
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