Theater: Life's Cuckold

THE BROWNING VERSION by Terence Rattigan

Nothing is more deceptive about The Browning Version than the insubstantiality of its plot; it seems to run without legs. After 18 years of teaching Greek literature to British boys, Andrew Crocker-Harris (Lee Richardson) is being eased out. Unwilling to scuttle standards for popularity, he has settled for the role of school ogre. The students have dubbed him the "Himmler of the Lower Fifth."

He is scarcely luckier at home. Andrew's wife Millie (Sheila Allen) is something of a snob, a shrew and a slut. Millie's only gift for truth is the poisonously emasculating one of recounting her adulteries to her husband. Her current affair with a virile and popular teacher (Edmond Genest) carries its own brand of pain; her lover clearly intends to break it off.

The title of the play derives from the act of a boy named John Taplow (Bruce Wall). The one pupil who fears Crocker-Harris but does not hate him, Taplow brings the teacher a going-away present, a secondhand copy of Robert Browning's translation of Agamemnon. The seemingly granitic "Crock" is riven by tears. The reliably bitchy Millie quickly dries his eyes by suggesting that the boy is simply buttering him up to get a passing grade.

Initially misconstrued as just another nimbly crafted British public school play, The Browning Version can now be seen as a surgical probing of hyprocrisy and emotional atrophy. Manhattan's redoubtable Roundabout Theater cast, superbly paced by Richardson, strikes a resonant pitch of humane understanding.

— By T.E. Kalem