QUARTERMAINE'S TERMS (by Simon Gray)

Рет қаралды 15,672

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 24

@ddgryphon Жыл бұрын

Excellent! The score is heartbreaking yet dignified. A thoroughly lovely production. All the pain and all beauty of Tennessee Williams best work, yet so completely British. I was fortunate to play Henry who like the other characters is richly complex. I would love to revisit that role now that I’m now in Henry’s age range. I knew it was a powerful show and am so glad to finally see it.

@thadtuiol1717 Жыл бұрын

I love how each character is, in their own way, slightly mad and slightly tragic

@indigofoxtrot5111 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you so much for posting this. I have the fondest memories of watching it many years ago and it was a delight to be able to watch it again and remember why.

@pninnabokov3734 Жыл бұрын

"Of this time, Of that Place" by Trilling is a play I'd love to see. I can't even get the short story to read online and must buy the expensive book of his stories.

@2msvalkyrie529 Жыл бұрын

Richard Jeffrey is superb as always ! Somehow he never quite made it into the household name Dept. An indicator perhaps of how many fine actors we had at that period. Unlike today.......David Tennant ?????!!? Need I say more ?

@MrWindermere123 Жыл бұрын

Peter Jeffrey, and you proved your own point.

@witlof5492 2 жыл бұрын

Excellent.

@zoyablake9538 2 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

@DwightWalker Жыл бұрын

Rather remarkable movie where all the ghosts are put to bed at the end.

@EyeofAffinado Жыл бұрын

Sir John Gielgud looks like Sir Laurence Olivier with those specs

@glowmentor 2 жыл бұрын

Such a quiet brutality.

@jjayaraman3191 Жыл бұрын

07jul2023 Screen Two.S03E12.Quartermaine's Terms.1987.(Ed Fox.J Gielgud.Eleanor Bron.P Jeffrey.)[B Hays]{S Gray]{1987 Ed Fox.J Gielgud Tessa Jones.P Jeffrey.Eleanor Bron.C Francis,)_8.6_1h24_ ./As St John Quartermaine's world largely consists of the staff-room at the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners, his relationships with his colleagues - not to mention his students - tend to be somewhat vague. And that presents problems.// Possibly the best piece of television I have ever seen. 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 KZbin 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.// 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.// 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.///

@genevievel5309 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for your most interesting comments which I have only (belatedly) just seen. Incidentally, 'All Passion Spent' is available on DVD from Amazon Australia.

@jjayaraman3191 Жыл бұрын

@@genevievel5309 All copied pasted from full read of User Comments in IMDB, YT etc etc ma'am :)

@MrWindermere123 Жыл бұрын

I've been pondering this puzzling play and film and two questions spring to mind: how old is St.John Quartermaine and where does he live outside school hours? An online review suggests that he has a worsening case of dementia, but he looks middle-aged to me - a bit young for dementia? If he lives in the school building as a bachelor, I think his grip on reality and his sense of purpose as a teacher have weakened. In effect he has become a stale, child-like escapee from real life.

@67Parsifal 4 ай бұрын

A case could be made that St. John suffers from undiagnosed autism - was autism even recognised as a thing in those days? He rents a room from a landlady who (if you read behind the lines) bullies him and probably wants rid of him. So there are lots of hidden pressures in his life which he responds to by ignoring them.

@jjayaraman3191 Жыл бұрын

Quartermaine's Terms.(Edward Fox, John Gielgud) 1987 Ed Fox.J Gielgud Tessa Jones.P Jeffrey.Eleanor Bron.C Francis,)_1h24_