A teacher of the Classics all his life, Andrew Crocker-Harris has epitomized the stuffy, hard-edged instructor unpopular with students and faculty. His dismal reputation is well-evidenced through wordless displeasure and mocking epithets ("Himmler of the lower fifth"), as only the pitying interest of a few provide an ear for his once-revered intellectual aptitude. Now on his last day before a pension-less "retirement", he tries to reconcile his mediocre achievements to the teaching ethics he's always maintained. Outside the classroom his personal life is a colossal degradation. In a brutal show of repulsion, his much-younger wife Millie openly flaunts her extramarital affair with a fellow teacher; exploiting every opportunity to obliterate Andrew's already tortured soul. With only his farewell speech remaining, Andrew's life and legacy are now held in the balance of his own convictions.The title 'Browning Version' is in reference to poet Robert Browning's translation of "Agamemnon", a Greek tragedy detailing the emotional whiplash of one man's death at the hands of his wife and her lover. Originally a play itself, 'Browning Version' is a 'dead-on' depiction of death experienced not physically, but through an emotional deterioration of the soul. Andrew's circumstances aren't just 'Everyman'; they're an abasement so severe that he's at the mercy of children for any emotional sustenance.
In a way, 'Browning Version' is sort-of like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Dead Poets Society with its marital discord and academic backdrop. The three or four primary characters exist within a strained consciousness, even in the context of very few words or gestures. Millie depends on Andrew, if merely as an object for derision, even as Andrew leans heavily on [student] Gilbert's scant appraisal of a long-forgotten book. Subtly, but not out of place, is the theme of achievement and its legitimacy as a catalyst towards self-worth and social entitlement.
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