Oxford Playhouse’s summer season might be drawing to a close, but that doesn’t mean that they are resting on their laurels any time soon. Rather than bring things down a notch or two, they are currently staging two plays an evening - Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version and Anton Chekhov’s Swansong. The linchpin of these two different plays is renowned film and television actor Peter Bowles (To the Manor Born, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Avengers) who displays enviable stamina in both his performances. The Chekhov play Swansong is no longer than twenty-five minutes, a one act play in which Bowle’s plays Svetlovidov, an aging actor drunkenly reminiscing about his past glories on the stage and ruminating on the horrors of old age and death. Almost unrecognisable in wig and toga, apart from his distinctive voice, he ambles onto the stage with nought but a candle, and for the next twenty minutes, accompanied only intermittently by James Laurenson as Nikita, wails and shouts and gives renditions of Hamlet, King Lear, and The Agamemmon.
The longer than usual interval gave the set dresses enough time to completely transform the stage into a beautiful Edwardian drawing room. Ostensibly this play could not be farther removed from Chekhov’s Swansong, but scratch a little deeper and the similarities emerge. Terrence Rattigan’s play tells the story of a classics teacher, Andrew Crocker-Harris, during his last few days at an unnamed public boy’s school. His academic career is coming to a close as his health is failing him, leaving the school for a place at a much less prestigious establishment. The brilliance of this play is that Rattigan manages to tell the lives of his characters through one sunny afternoon in a series of mishaps and revelations that bring buried emotions to the fore, piercing the stiff-upper-lip guard of the protagonists. There is exceptional ensemble work by Candida Gubbins as Crocker-Harris’s wife, a mean spirited and vengeful flirt, Charles Edwards as Frank Hunter, who is having an affair with Mrs. Crocker-Harris, and James Musgrave as Taplow, an affable student who gets some of the funniest lines in the play and duly relishes them.
The real praise must be reserved for Peter Bowles’ superb performance, brilliantly understated and yet masterful at the same time. His Crocker-Harris is stoic yet tragic, impenetrable but vulnerable too. When he hears that the headmaster refers to him as the ‘Himmler of the lower-fifth’ his shock and hurt is palpable. As the same headmaster hits him with the double blow of not being awarded a pension and having to make way in a speeches ceremony for a more popular sports master, his resignation and politeness are wrought with great pathos. When Taplow gives his respected teacher a copy of The Agammenon in verse, a sincere gesture of gratitude, the elder man is moved to heart wrenching tears. Peter Bowles proves that he is still one of the finest British actors alive today, effortlessly taking on two roles in one evening and giving his all to both.
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