Andrew Crocker-Harris is an ageing Classics master at an English public school, and is forced into retirement by his increasing ill health.

Rattigan and Asquith encountered a lack of enthusiasm from producers to turn the play into a film until they met Earl St John at Rank.

"This experience made me realise that the ordinary people in the remotest places in the country were entitled to see the works of the best modern British playwrights.

The Greek text that appears on the blackboard in Crocker-Harris's classroom is the Agamemnon lines 414–9: πόθῳ δ᾽ ὑπερποντίας φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν.

Apparently a description of Menelaus's despair after his abandonment by Helen, the lines were translated by Robert Browning thus: "And, through desire of one across the main, A ghost will seem within the house to reign.