Another Country (play)
Another Country is a play written by English playwright Julian Mitchell.[1] It premiered on 5 November 1981 at the Greenwich Theatre, London.
The play won the Society of West End Theatre Awards Play of the Year title for 1982. The play takes its title from a lyric in the British patriotic hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country." It has been described as a "hit play", and that "in the theatre business the play is a legend, having launched the careers of several pimply actors in their very first jobs, including Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth."
Synopsis
Another Country is loosely based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess, renamed "Guy Bennett" in the play. It examines the effect the persecution of his orientation and exposure to Marxism has on his life and the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school he attends. The setting is a 1930s public school where pupils Guy Bennett and Tommy Judd become friends because they are both outsiders. Bennett is gay, while Judd is a Marxist. Judd was based on John Cornford, who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War."
The play opens with the discovery that a pupil named Martineau has hanged himself after being caught by a teacher having sex with another boy. The first act follows the reaction of some of the students to his death as the senior boys try to keep the scandal away from both the parents and the outside world. Barclay, the Head of Gascoigne's House, moves towards a nervous breakdown, blaming himself for the boy's despair. Bennett, the only openly gay member of the school, pretends nonchalance but is deeply troubled by the suicide. His best friend Judd, the school's only Marxist, believes the death is a symptom of the school's oppressive regime. When the parents of the aristocratic Devenish threaten to remove him from the school in light of the scandal, Fowler (a prefect) attempts to crack down on the perceived perversion in his House and to persecute Bennett in particular. The other students initially defend Bennett's provocative and incendiary behavior (partly due to Bennett's ability to blackmail them with knowledge of their own same-sex trysts). Meanwhile, Judd is reluctant to join the school's exclusive 'Twenty-Two' society (a name which references Eton's 'Pop') himself. This is because he feels that this would endorse the school's system of oppression. However, he agrees to do so – after much pressure from his peers Menzies and Bennett – in the hope of preventing the hated Fowler from becoming Head of House in the wake of the Martineau scandal. But in the end, Judd's moral sacrifice is for nothing. In the second act, Fowler intercepts a letter from Bennett to his lover Harcourt, and Bennett's supporters fade away. Bennett is beaten, Judd is humiliated, and Devenish is ultimately invited to join 'Twenty-Two' in the place of Bennett, shattering Bennett's childhood dream.
In the play's closing scene, Bennett and Judd recognize that the school's illusory hold upon them has been broken and that the British class system relies strongly on outward appearances. They begin to contemplate life anew, inspired by the example of Devenish's rebellious uncle, Vaughan Cunningham (who, in a subplot, visits the school). Bennett picks up Judd's copy of Das Kapital and muses, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if all this was true?’
Wikipedia article: Another Country (play) ↗
Notes
- This film has homosexual themes.
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