Tonight on L.A. Theatre Works, Quartermaine’s Terms by Simon Gray is presented, starring Keene Curtis, Ian Ogilvy, and Holland Taylor.
The play takes place over a period of two years in the 1960s in the staffroom at a Cambridge school for teaching English to foreigners. It deals with the interrelationship between seven teachers at the school in particular that between St John (pronounced ‘Sinjon’) Quartermaine and the others.
The dominant theme is loneliness and during the course of the play all of the characters experience the trauma of being or feeling alone. While the play is at times highly comic, it has a very serious theme.
About the playwright:
Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others’ works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
