‘Powerful, truthful and shocking: Why ‘The Browning Version’ will stay with me’

It crept up on me quite unexpectedly. While fossicking through the cupboard in which are stacked a heap of old DVDs, my hand fell upon one whose cover I had not opened in years. I had seen the 1994 movie of The Browning Version on television not long after it came and went, ever so briefly in the cinemas.

Yet, it must have made some impression on me because I chose to buy a copy of the movie when it was eventually released on DVD; but then promptly forgot about it.

For reasons which escape me, I recently took a belated interest in the works of the British playwright Terence Rattigan, cajoling my local library to import a few on inter-library loans, which I promptly devoured. One of them was ‘The Browning Version’, his 1948 play which drew heavily on Rattigan’s own experiences as a schoolboy at Harrow 20 years previously.

Briefly, the play is about the disintegrating marriage of a humourless Classics teacher (Andrew Crocker-Harris and his wife) at a prestigious English public (that is, private) boys’ school.

Theatrically, this one-act play is set entirely in the living room of the Crocker-Harris residence on the school grounds. And all the action, involving a number of characters passing through, occurs in this one small room, making for an intense audience experience as it watches the play move towards its shattering finale.

As I said, on first viewing, the 1994 film (there was a 1951 version starring Michael Redgrave) left no lasting impression on me beyond the smouldering presence of the great Albert Finney as the hapless teacher, conveying a man without anchors as his world flounders around him. While my finger-tips had run past The Browning Version many times since, my recent introduction to Rattigan’s work must have impelled me, I suppose, to look again at how effectively his ideas had survived the transition to a different medium.

The most obvious change, as one would expect, was the opening out of the production, removing it from the claustrophobia of a single room to the expansiveness of the entire school grounds, to which were added scenes in the local village where Laura Crocker-Harris (Greta Scacchi) and her lover, American science master Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine), meet and are observed.

In this regard, I think the influence of Dead Poets Society (1989) is visible in embroidering a haunting context in which intensely personal action becomes believably human, and not the hotbed of mutual hatred which made the play so explosive on stage in 1948 — but which, on film, might have reduced it to the kind of sustained rants that crippled ‘Look Back in Anger’ (John Osborne) and ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ (Edward Albee) when they were transported to the screen. The difference, in other words, between WATCHING a horror story and EXPERIENCING a tragedy.

The 1994 Browning Version garnered no swag of prizes and has barely rated a mention since. But, having read the play almost immediately before re-watching the movie after a long gap in time (and personal experience), I can now appreciate what a masterpiece I believe it to be.

For a start, you can hardly avoid the presence of sex in the play; indeed, its climax comes when Crocker-Harris and Hunter actually discuss the cuckolding and its sordid details, with the latter “rending his garments” in abject contrition, while trying to warn his victim of the poisonous nature of the wife. Shocking, in-your-face-stuff, but lacking any deeper subtlety.

In the 1994 movie version, however, specific unfaithfulness is always unstated, with the final understanding between the two “rivals” reached on far more abstract, but universal, grounds than the ugly circumstances of a marriage dismemberment. The issue, for Crocker-Harris and the film, and eventually for his antagonist Hunter, I believe, is incompatibility and the poisonous failure to address it. In this view, the only crime that Hunter has committed, in Crocker-Harris’s eyes, is “to take sides”, adding that it is “diminishing” to do so.

But, I also believe there is more to the movie’s greatness than incompatibility and the nasty behaviour it may engender when people feel trapped within its claws.

The title refers to a 5th century BC play by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, translated by the 19th century English poet Robert Browning. When Crocker-Harris gives a rendition to his class as to how the play should be read in translation, the metaphor that is the drama of an unfaithful wife murdering her husband is horribly revealed. And Finney’s acting is so brilliant, it explains why the film, for all its diffusion into a wider canvas, packs more power than the original play. Crocker-Harris, we see, is no cuckolded husband, victim of a vengeful wife (as is the Clytemnestra of Aeschylus’s drama) — Crocker-Harris is nothing less than a wounded animal, one whose wounds are self-inflicted.

Where the film, most theatrically, diverges from the play, is in its concluding portions where, firstly, through the crass fawning of the school’s headmaster (Michael Gambon) we can see why a precise perfectionist (and idealist) like Crocker-Harris might have failed, through being, essentially, a man out of his time.

And secondly, by injecting the final school assembly into the plot (it is only referred to by inference in the play), we see a truer picture of Crocker-Harris’s inner destruction. Rising to give his last address, we are tempted to believe it will be a defence of the Classics as the source of all humanism and civilisation in a harsh, materialist world. That is clearly what he believes, but what crushes him is not that he is adrift in an uncaring world, but that he failed to persuade his students to appreciate the value of the higher things that his own life was once dedicated to.

Great acting and powerful stuff and yet, truthful for any person who dares cast an honest eye over what they, themselves, made of the gift of life.

Over time, I have seen many movies that are right shockers, too numerous to mention, although I defy anyone to trump The Kettles in the Ozarks which I once bought on a sentimental whim. And there are many which were powerful influences on me at various moments: Tom Jones, Dr No, Nothing but the Best, Chariots of Fire, The Mission and Dead Poets Society all spring to mind.

But as to those few films that leave you thinking long after the last credits have slipped from view, I feel sure The Browning Version will stay with me, in a way that Terence Rattigan, at just 37, could not have imagined.