SOURCE: Spencer, Charles. “Crying with Pain and Laughter.” Daily Telegraph (20 June 1994): 19.

In the following review of the 1994 London revival of The Browning Version, Spencer contends that “Rattigan is a matchless chronicler of English reserve and deep-buried pain.”

Terence Rattigan was discovered by his valet “weeping uncontrollably” as he wrote The Browning Version (1948), and it isn't hard to see why. In this marvellous one-act play, now receiving a deeply moving revival at the Greenwich Theatre, Rattigan conjures up a world of almost unbearable pain. It is a small masterpiece, which, like The Deep Blue Sea, makes the playwright's long years in the critical wilderness seem frankly inexplicable. Clive Merrison gives a magnificent performance as Andrew Crocker-Harris, a desiccated classics beak at an English public school who is taking early retirement because of ill health. In the course of 75 minutes, he is repeatedly humiliated—by his snobbish wife who openly...