THEATRE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2026 | Volume 269

 

The last time I saw a Terence Rattigan play in Vancouver—ten years ago—here’s how I began my review:

When I first studied Modern British Drama back in the 1960s, the creation story went like this: modern drama began in 1956 with kitchen sink and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Working class hero Osborne begat John Arden and Arden begat Harold Pinter (with Beckett in the background). The Old School incarnate, the serpent of well-made melodrama that had to be kicked out of the garden for theatrical paradise to ensue, was Terence Rattigan, Oxford-educated upper-class twit.That image of Rattigan was only partly true, and with time his plays have made a comeback in the UK and in Canadian venues like the Shaw Festival.

The play I was reviewing, Rattigan’s The Flare Path,was a sprawling wartime melodrama about love and survival in the RAF.The current Rattigan play, The Browning Version, in William B. Davis’Smoking Gun Collective production,is tamer and more contained, a postwar character study of an elderly teacher at a British boarding school facing up to the realities of his life, and the stiff-upper-lip British class-structure that looked for a while as if it might crumble.

Three-quarters of a century on, the world of The Browning Version, first produced in 1948, feels almost as antique as the Aeschylus that Andrew Crocker-Harris (Douglas Abel), known to his students as “The Crock,” teaches. Yet the play has a kind of solidity and sympathetic integrity that makes it worth watching, though the production got off to a somewhat shaky start.

It’s the day before the last day of term in the Crocker-Harris’ living room (not quite a drawing room, says his wife, Millie [Lucia Frangione]), as Crocker-Harris prepares to retire from the school where he has taught and lived for decades. We meet his colleague, Frank Hunter (Chris Walters), who is having an affair with Millie, and one of The Crock’s students, Taplow (Kamil Whaley-Kalaora), who has come to say goodbye and to find out if Crocker-Harris has passed him.

The Crock is definitely old school, strict and pedantic. He has a heart problem and is moving to a job with less pressure and lower salary. When he’s visited by the Head Master (John Prowse), he suffers the first of what will be a series of humiliations that mark the end of his tenure. His marriage is a shambles, his students dislike him, and the institution itself betrays him. He is admittedly “a complete failure.” Only the gift of an Aeschylus translation from Taplow (“the Browning version”) provides some salve. Yet the man remains incorrigible and impervious, passively accepting who he is and what he has been in a way that Rattigan suggests is somehow heroic. It’s as if George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? refused to fight back.

The opening night problems may have resulted from the company’s having had to replace two of its lead actors during rehearsals. Both Abel’s Crocker-Harris and Prowse’s Head Master seemed slow and tentative as if grasping for their lines, while Walters’ Frank and Frangione’s Millie offer strong, aggressive performances. The star of the show for me is Whaley-Kalaora, whose Taplow dances around Crocker-Harris with a combination of loathing and admiration for the man. It’s an impressively confident performance from a young actor I hadn’t seen before. Look out for this kid.

There’s a whole level of social commentary in the play buried in a throwaway exchange between Millie and Mrs. Gilbert (Zoe Salvin), the wife of the man who will be taking Crocker-Harris’ job. “You cook?” she asks Millie in surprise. “Yes,” Millie says, “these days we all must do what we weren’t trained to do.” It’s a mid-twentieth century world where even the wife of a schoolmaster should have servants. Shoring up the hesitancy in the production should sharpen both the play’s fascinating sociology and its psychology of a man facing his sorry truths.

 

 

 

 

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