Terence Rattigan (1911–1977)

A slightly strange story about the last day of term in a boys' public school in the 1950s. In black and white. The unpopular classics master is leaving; his colleagues and students see him as unemotional, almost 'dead' emotionally, but his real self emerges in various ways.

We meet his unbelievably ghastly wife, a boy in his class who's fairly empathic and also quite likes classics, a colleague who has been conducting an affair with his wife, and more.

The acting is good, in a 1950s kind of way, once you get past the pseudo-BBC accents. The directing is good too. The people are believable and the flow of the film works well.

But it's rather a depressing story without any clear conclusion. We are unlikely to watch it again.… (more)

An interesting set of what is actually two plays, though it reads more like two acts of one play, connected only by the same characters and setting. The stories could be told independently, and no one would ever know they were connected. I found both of them somewhat disturbing, but particularly the second. They are steeped in the ideas and morals of their time, and that means that the characters fuss about things no one would likely notice today. The dialogue is often quotidian, but I think that is the direct intention of the author. He intends this to be about people in their usual mode of interaction, thrown into a new situation. I didn't find the stories particularly compelling, but perhaps onstage they would play better than they read. The edition included some alternate scenes for the second act, which were never performed because they were too...problematic...for the time, I suppose. I must say, I preferred the alternate scenes. The original act as written was difficult to deal with because it depicted actions that were then and remain criminal, and violated the rights of various women, and we are expected to forgive the act. In the alternate scenes, the ones where the actions were too troubling for audiences, most of us would probably say, so what? But at the time this play came out, those were criminal actions that got much more serious penalty than the much more disturbing (to modern minds, especially women) scenes that were deemed more acceptable for stage. So this was an interesting exercise in trying to view a work through the eyes of its own time. At the very least, it made me glad I live in this time, warts and all.… (more)