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In
Yer Space |
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Arnold School Drama Group based
in Blackpool.
More…
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Quartermaines
Terms - by Simon Gray |
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Royal Theatre, Northampton -
Friday 19th September to Saturday 4th October, 2003
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
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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.
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Quartermaine's
Terms By Simon Gray - Salisbury Playhouse
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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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