Quartermaine's Terms

Set in the 1960s in a Cambridge school teaching English to foreign students, this play is a humorous and ultimately moving account of several years in the lives of seven teachers. At the centre of the group is St John Quartermaine: agreeable, pleasant but hopeless as a teacher and desperately lonely outside school life. He seems an almost permanent fixture in the staffroom, always available to listen to the personal problems of his self-obsessed colleagues, each of whom harbours a private tragedy. Whilst the play has a serious theme, it’s full of comedy often resulting from the characters being blissfully unaware of how they appear to others.

First staged in 1981, “Quartermaine’s Terms” is perhaps Simon Gray’s finest work; an English drama that stands comparison with Chekhov in its ability to combine comedy with a powerful undercurrent of melancholy and loss. Rowan Atkinson starred in the recent West End revival of this award winning play and received rave reviews.