Quaint Honour - Oberon Modern Plays by Roger Gellert Paperback

About the Book

A highly controversial and brutally frank play about the effects of sexual oppression at a time when the lives of young queer people were challenged by both the law and the education system

Book Synopsis

Quaint Honour, a play about relationships between boys at a boarding school, was first staged in 1958 when homosexuality was still illegal. This publication marks it's revival at the Finborough Theatre in 2017.

A boy's boarding school in the late 1950s. Homosexuality in the UK is illegal, but behind closed doors and behind the back of the Headmaster, gay sexual activity between the students is rife. When one of the pupils accepts a challenge to seduce a younger student, he sets in motion a dangerous game of manipulation and corruption, causing devastating consequences that neither student could ever have imagined...

Presented for the first time since its world premiere in 1958 and celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 which decriminalised homosexuality in the UK, Quaint Honour examines the effects of sexual oppression at a time when the lives of young queer people were challenged by both the law and the education system.

"...a thoroughly well-built play, traditionally structured, flooded with eloquence, and bearing a raft of knotty ethical questions." (The Stage)

Review Quotes

"The most honest and informative play about homosexuality that has yet been performed in England." --The Observer, 1958

About the Author

Playwright Roger Gellert (1927-2013) began his career as a script reader for the iconic theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, before going on to become Literary Editor for the Royal Shakespeare Company where he translated the plays of Jean Giraudoux, and Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He was also a theatre critic for The New Statesman. Quaint Honour was his only original play.