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. Under the title Bachelor Born, the play was presented on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre in January 1938, running for just over a year. A film was made of the play in 1938.

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. Several of these plays were stage adaptions of novels. Hay published Housemaster as a novel earlier in 1936, before it was brought to the stage.

In his early years Hay had been a schoolmaster at Durham School and Fettes College. His biographer Patrick Murray suggests that the former, which had a strong rowing tradition, is the model for Hay's Marbledown School in Housemaster.

Housemaster was first produced at the Apollo Theatre, London, on 12 November 1936, and ran for 662 performances. 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.

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