English eccentrics

Quartermaine’s Terms is a period piece within a period piece. It’s set in that part of the early 1960s which was still effectively the 1950s. St John Quartermaine, a shy bumbler, is the oldest and most useless teacher at a Cambridge language school. All his colleagues are lovable freaks. There’s the Jesus-worshipping spinster shackled to her ailing mum. There’s the caravanning dad who takes calamitous holidays in rain-swept Norfolk. There’s the wannabe novelist ditched by his wife while writing a particularly heartfelt chapter about marital bliss. And there’s the boss, a fogeyish queen, who has no idea the school is heading for the buffers. Each of these charming eccentrics arrives in the staffroom every day, like a penitent to the confessional, and unloads his or her sorrows in a neutral space. It’s an inspired plan.

Writer Simon Gray does more than illustrate the detachment of English people, and their fear of confrontation, he formally incorporates it in the play’s architecture. But this masterstroke also deprives the drama of a vital resource: significant real-time action. Nothing much happens in front of us and we end up feeling we’re in the warm-up arena rather than the Olympic stadium.

Quartermaine is a sweet-natured nerd in a three-piece suit who skulks at the fringes of the action and makes the odd clumsy attempt to involve himself in colleagues’ lives. He fails, of course. It’s a tragic role but without tragic lines or tragic deeds. A sense of inner coldness and bewildered reserve must be communicated by implication and suggestion. Rowan Atkinson, one of the world’s greatest mimes, responds by giving us the anxious, static grin that we’re familiar with. This goofy mask is ideal for an interfering butterfingers like Mr Bean or for an angry misfit like Blackadder.