The other side of The Browning Version

A page from the play

The Browning Version is a brilliant one act play by Terence Rattigan. A brief extract from it is incorporated in CBSE’s grade eleven English, though I have never understood why. The extract presents an interaction between a sly student Taplow and a young teacher Frank. Apart from some little games that people play in day-to-day life, the extract conveys nothing about the complex intricacies of human relationships which is what Rattigan’s play is about.

The play is primarily about the incompatible relationship between Andrew Crocker-Harris and his wife Millie. Andrew is aware of his wife’s infidelity. Millie has her flings with other men, Frank being one of them. Frank is not aware of her other flings, however. Rather he assumes she is in genuine love with him.

The play brilliantly portrays the complexities of human motives and behaviour. Andrew is a rigidly strict teacher who knows that he is not liked by his students who are in the 15-16 age group. It is difficult for a strict teacher to be popular with students and without some degree of popularity it is difficulty to be a successful teacher. So Andrew discovered “an easy substitute for popularity”. He acquired some mannerisms and “tricks of speech” which made him amusing to students. At the very beginning of the play we find Taplow imitating his speech and mannerisms to Frank. “They didn’t like me as a man,” Andrew tells Frank later, “but they found me funny as a character, and you can teach more things by laughter than by earnestness.”

Andrew is painfully aware of his own limitations. But to his consolation comes Taplow with a farewell gift on the last day of school. Andrew is leaving school due to ill health. But his strictness has necessitated a little punishment even on the last day for Taplow who missed a class earlier. Circumstances bring about a mitigation to the punishment and Taplow gratefully (?) presents a second-hand copy (which is all that he could get apparently) of The Browning Version of Agamemnon, the Greek classic on which he was given extra work. He has quoted a line from the play on the first page as a mark of his love for his teacher: “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”

Millie laughs at that gift and even more at Taplow’s inscription. She tells her husband that Taplow was mocking him to Frank as she walked in. She had seen how Taplow imitated her husband’s speech and mannerism. In short, she now tells her husband that Taplow has made a fool of him by giving that gift.

Andrew’s heart aches at that realisation and he needs an extra dose of his drug to soothe his heart. Frank gets an epiphanous peep into Millie’s intrinsic cruelty. He decides to break off totally with her. The disillusionment cures Andrew of some of his timidity and martyr-complex. The play ends with him asserting himself as he never did earlier.

The play has a few other minor characters too all of whom have their share of inner darkness that borders on maliciousness. Human nature is essentially vile, Rattigan seems to suggest. Each one of us discovers our ways of concealing or suppressing our malice. Yet it comes to light under certain circumstances like when our need to project a better image of ourselves overwhelms us. We have to accept that people are vile and learn the ways of dealing with that vileness.

Andrew has learnt that lesson towards the end of the play when he says, “I may have been … a brilliant classical scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the facts of life. I know better now, of course.”

I started this post with a reference to CBSE. Let me end it with a suggestion: it’s time to change the English textbooks. Just as the extract from this play reveals nothing about the play itself and hence serves no significant purpose, there are many lessons that are quite irrelevant today or are plainly unsuitable for the grade.