The Browning Version Themes

Terrence Rattigan’s The Browning Version is a poignant critique of the way a person’s worth is measured by their “successes” and “failures,” and how these come to govern an individual’s life and way of being. Focusing on schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris’s final day of serious employment, Rattigan manages over the course of the play to subtly suggest the flaws of evaluating life with such a crude measure as “success or failure,” and asks the audience…

The Browning Version is in part an exploration of love and marriage, specifically a marriage that love has deserted long ago. Though Millie and Andrew have been together for a long time, it is clear that their relationship is merely one of perfunctory gestures—of “keeping up appearances.” Rattigan’s play thus works to show the dangers of letting a bad marriage fester and worsen over the years, the way in which love gradually erodes into hatred…

Rattigan’s play makes effective use of characters’ different ages to show the distinct stages in an individual’s life and the way in which these ages affect people psychologically. Ultimately, this is a device that serves to heighten the quiet undercurrent of tragedy that pervades the life of Andrew Crocker-Harris: there is a sense in which his chance at life has gone. Though he is not quite at retirement age yet, he is old enough…