 GOODBYE MR. CHIPS
Music & Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse
Based on the novel by James Hilton
Chichister Festival Theatre - August 11, 1982 (38 perfs)
Story:
At Brookfield, the school day begins with Arthur Chipping
- Mr Chips - taking the class register. Then the boys sing the school
song, in which they hope for a meaningful role in their future lives.
Mr Chips, the classics master at Brookfield, yearns for the more elevating
values - honour, peace, brotherly love which marked the Ancient Greek
world. The boys, clearly, do not share his enthusiasm as, ungrammatically,
they drone their way through a translation of Homer, the Ancient Greek
poet. They sing of their boredom and the hard grind they must endure.
Mr Chips has a rueful contempt for the boys' philistine
values: 'They have mud in their brains,' he claims. All the same, he feels
a failure because he cannot communicate to them his own love of the classics.
The boys rush off as the eagerly anticipated holidays begin. Despite his cynical mood, Chips realizes sadly how brief
schooldays and youth can be and how soon, or so it seems, they become
regretted memories of the past. Mr Chips has planned to spend the holidays
in Harrogate, a very humdrum choice according to his friend Max Staefel,
the German master at Brookfield. Max wants Chips to do something more
exciting.
Unknown to either of them, Max's success in getting Chips
to join him on holiday in Austria has given the lonely classics master
a wonderful chance of happiness. In Austria, Chips meets a young woman,
Katherine Bridges. Although until then a confirmed bachelor, Chips warms
to the delightful Katherine, who is bright, intelligent and charming -
not at all the sort of woman Chips has met in his restricted academic
life. For her part, despite the difference in their ages, Katherine falls
in love with Chips. She sees the kindliness beneath the fuddy-duddy exterior
Chips shows to the world and to his pupils at Brookfield, who think him
a tyrannical bore. Katherine resolves to tell Chips at the earliest opportunity
how she feels about him.
The holidays are over. The masters' trips abroad and
the boys' time at home have ended and they return for another term at
Brookfield. The boys, of course, are not exactly happy, but cheer themselves
up by contemplating the magic age of 17, when they can leave school behind
for ever.
Katherine, meanwhile, has achieved her wish to tell Mr
Chips that she loves him. He is, at first, rather taken aback. It has
never occurred to him that a beautiful young lady like Katherine could
possibly find him attractive. However, much to his own surprise, he proposes
to her and she, even more amazingly to him, accepts. They marry and he
brings her to Brookfield. There, she becomes very popular with the boys
as she brings some brightness into their tedious lives.
Katherine's new position at the school does not turn
out to be an easy one. Chips has shocked some of his stuffier teaching
colleagues and their snobbish wives by marrying a woman from outside the
narrow confines of the school world and the wives are, frankly, jealous
of her popularity. Chips and Katherine are, however, determined that love
will see them through all the difficulties the future may hold.
After all his years alone and unappreciated, Chips is
now truly happy at last, all the more so because he and Katherine are
expecting a child. Sadly, tragedy awaits and, after Katherine's death
in childbirth, time moves on many years into the future, making her and
her dead son only a sad, long-ago memory. Chips is now a very old man,
steeped in fond nostalgia for the past. As he lies dying, he looks back
on his youth.
As Chips nears his end, Katherine's voice comes back
to him, singing once again of the great love they so briefly shared and
the happiness they enjoyed together.
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