Quartermaine's Terms

1987 film by Bill Hays

Quartermaine's Terms is a play by Simon Gray which won The Cheltenham Prize in 1982.

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 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. Mark’s wife leaves him; Derek, from Hull, finds Cambridge initially unwelcoming; Eddie is ultimately bereaved by the loss of a partner; Anita’s husband is a philanderer; Henry is trapped in a dysfunctional nuclear family and Melanie is similarly trapped caring for a mother whom she despises. Quartermaine is a painfully lonely bachelor, seemingly with no friends other than his colleagues at the school. Although the play is at times highly comic, it has a very serious theme; and the struggles of each character with their own types of loneliness are moving and sad. Above all, Quartermaine himself is an increasingly pathetic figure lost in his own confused thoughts – and ultimately deserted. His future as the play closes is poignantly bleak.

The play opened at Wyndham's Theatre on 23 January 2013, after brief runs at Theatre Royal, Brighton, and the Theatre Royal, Bath. while The Daily Telegraph wrote "there’s a delight in watching a playwright so in control of his craft that he holds you riveted in a world where only the silence seems to scream."