Quartermaine's Terms

The main purpose for using this space is to ask why this marvelous production is not available, nor has it been aired on TV for many years. Two other wonderful movies have met the same fate - "All Passion Spent" and Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory".

Three cinematic gems gathering dust. Such a shame.

A pitch-perfect adaptation of what is probably Simon Gray's best play, about the staff of a struggling language school in Cambridge in the early 1960s. Couldn't sound duller, couldn't be better. Splendid performances by all, especially John Gielgud and Edward Fox in the title role. Highly recommended, but I'm not even sure how one would go about seeing it. As far as I know it's never been available on tape or DVD. I was lucky enough to tape it on PBS in the '80s and have held on to the tape since then.

Superb mounting of a marvelous play, with every member of the cast pitch-perfect, especially John Gielgud as Eddie, the assistant principal of an English school to teach foreigners the customs and language of England, and Edward Fox, as St. John Quartermaine, a slow-witted teacher. The action takes place in the teachers' lounge, as each of the half-dozen staffers reveals his or her problems in the course of often oblique conversations. The play is a masterpiece of dramatic construction, and with every viewing some new facets are exposed. The play was shown on TV over 20 years ago and then disappeared, as did so many dramatic gems ("Relatively Speaking," "Season's Greetings," "Waters of the Moon"). What's wrong with TV producers these days? While they pay idiots good money to write trash, wonderful plays like this one lie forgotten in some vault. I'm glad I was lucky enough or smart enough to tape it, and I've transfered it to DVD, but it's a bit tired, and I'd love it if the master could be given another spin.

Quartermaine's Terms is a sad and beautiful play by Simon Gray concerning the mental decline of a teacher in an English school. It's mostly a character study of selfish people, and how they face life's tragedies, great and small, and their relationship with a colleague who is no longer up to snuff. These teachers and administrators aren't bad people, they just have, as the saying goes, their own agenda. They can't really help poor Quartermaine, whose mind wanders a lot, and who has lately been missing classes. Then again, they don't really try. Quartermaine, for his part, is an amiable sort, and likes everybody. Whatever his faults, Quartermaine is not selfish. He's a good team player in his way, but he doesn't know how to play the game.

We never get a diagnosis of this man, who is clearly suffering from some form of mental illness, as we see him from the outside only, as his colleagues do. What we do see clearly are the other teachers; their pettiness, self-absorption and above all their apathy; and this aspect of the play rings especially true. Quartermaine's Terms offers a devastatingly accurate, exceedingly unflattering picture of a certain aspect of genteel middle class life, of which it is, by implication, an indictment, and manages to do so without anyone in the play having to raise his voice.

It's so sad that plays like this no longer grace our screens, even, it would seem, for reruns. It has taken me 30 years to get hold of a copy (a DVD converted from a fairly decent video recording), just to see this again as the quality of the YouTube version is too awful to enjoy.

It's a wonderful, wonderful play. Brilliantly written, casted and performed.

The setting is the staffroom of an English language college for foreign students somewhere in Cambridge. I think that Edward Fox was born to play the role of protagonist St. John Quartermaine. St. John (pronounced 'sinjun') is a kind and lonely language professor who is becoming increasingly absent-minded and forgetful, probably due to some form of creeping dementia. Having loyally served at the college since its founding, his life revolves around work as he appears to have no social life of his own. He is well liked by his colleagues, however they take advantage of his good nature and are always too preoccupied with their own concerns to really notice what we the viewers see- a man gradually and inexorably heading towards crisis, in desperate need of care and support.

I consider this to be a little masterpiece, funny and tragic in equal measure.

Find it, watch it, treasure it.