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Quartermaine's
Terms
Royal Theatre, Northampton
Friday
19th September to Saturday 4th October, 2003
Tickets: £5.00 to £27.00
Box Office: 624811 |
| Reviewer's
rating: |
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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.
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| St
John Quartermaine (Rupert Wickham) listens to Henry Windscape
(Timothy Davies) |
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.
Another world
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| Anita
Manchip (Sophie Shaw) |
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.
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| Eddie
Loomis (Ian Price) and Mark Sackling (Josh Cohen) |
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.
Pictures by Robert Day
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