Quartermaine's Terms – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jan/30/quartermaines-terms-wyndhams-london-review

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For a convivial chap, Simon Gray was oddly preoccupied with loneliness. And in this play, first seen in 1981, he takes his fascination with the English sense of detachment to unusual lengths. The result is a rueful social comedy that stands up well to revival and gives star billing to Rowan Atkinson, who reminds us in his first straight play in 25 years that he is a highly capable actor.

The setting is archetypal Gray: the staff room of a Cambridge school that teaches English to foreigners in the early 60s. The staff are a decidedly mixed bunch: a failed novelist, a serially deceived wife, a mother-dominated singleton and an accident-prone newcomer. The only reasonably cheerful people appear to be a tweedy liberal humanist and the school's discreetly gay co-principal. But the most contented of all is Atkinson's St John Quartermaine: a diffident bachelor who, in the words of another character, has "an amazing ability not to let the world impinge on you".

In its study of loss and loneliness, the play clearly owes a debt to Chekhov. The new arrival whose whole life is a series of misfortunes is straight out of The Cherry Orchard which, we're told at one point, is playing at the Cambridge Arts. There is an undercurrent of unrequited love that reminds one of Uncle Vanya. And, as in Chekhov, these characters are all revealed to be implacable egotists. The big difference is that Chekhov's characters have an unsatisfied rage for life whereas Gray's suffer a little too passively.

But Gray's great strength lies in his sense of irony. The biggest joke of all is that these motley misfits are not just teaching language but imparting English values to eager foreigners; yet they themselves embody, to a fault, the English failure to connect emotionally.

It is a measure of Gray's mordant observation that the beaming humanist, who loves to take his wife to Renoir's The Rules of the Game, presides over a domestic catastrophe and profesionally commits an act of undoubted cruelty. Behind the play's seeming lack of incident lies a serious critique of what it means to be English.

Atkinson, however, is the box-office draw and what he conveys is the essential loneliness of the long-distance teacher. Even the first sight of him, rhythmically tapping his knees in a deserted staff-room, imparts a sense of rooted solitude. Atkinson also seems to inhabit his own private world that exists at a tangent to reality: when the newcomer, having met the girl of his dreams, talks romantically of love, Atkinson follows his skyward gaze as if half expecting to see a cloud-borne Cupid. Without effacing memories of Edward Fox in the role, Atkinson suggests a man whose very niceness is inherently tragic.

Richard Eyre's immaculate production never allows Atkinson to overbalance the play. Malcolm Sinclair is excellent as the co-principal diffusing a bland bonhomie that also seems detached from reality. Conleth Hill, as the hearty senior lecturer, represents a beaming contentment with life that turns out to be fatally misplaced.

Will Keen, as the newcomer, is both comically vulnerable and aggressively edgy and Louise Ford as the deceived wife exudes a cardiganed emotional containment.

In one sense, the play is a throwback to the age of the well-made West End play. But what it pins down with, acuity, is that peculiarly English quality of embarrassment in the face of emotion. There's a defining moment when Hill's lecturer finds himself frontally accosted by Felicity Montagu as his closeted spinster-admirer and rushes to answer a ringing telephone with a palpable sense of relief. That says everything about Gray's world in which passion and confrontation are things that defy the implacable English sense of decorum.