Housemaster (play)

Housemaster is a comedy by the English playwright Ian Hay, first produced at the Apollo Theatre, London, on 12 November 1936, running for 662 performances.

The play depicts the conflict between a wise housemaster and a puritanical younger headmaster at an English public school, with the action complicated by the unexpected incursion of two women and two girls who have to be accommodated in the otherwise all-male establishment.

Ian Hay had written fifteen plays since his first, Tilly of Bloomsbury (1919), most of them in collaboration with other writers – Seymour Hicks, P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen King-Hall, Guy Bolton, Anthony Armstrong, A. E. W. Mason and Edgar Wallace.

His biographer Patrick Murray suggests that the former, which had a strong rowing tradition, is the model for Hay's Marbledown School in Housemaster.

[1] The play transferred to America under the title Bachelor Born, and was presented on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre in January 1938, running for just over a year.

Hastings and the rest of the teaching staff, and their pupils, are discontented at the puritanical innovations imposed by Ovington, the recently appointed headmaster.

The Play Pictorial commented, "Housemaster bears on every scene the unmistakable imprint of Ian Hay's master hand.

[7] The Manchester Guardian commented: This is a play for those who find joy in an amusing study of the contrasts between young and old, their foibles and their differences in type and character.

[9] The play was given in the English provinces in 1937 by a touring company with Michael Logan as Donkin, and a young Richard Pearson as Flossie Nightingale.