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Thursday, 07 August 2008
RIP: Simon Gray
Compared to his contemporaries Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and Caryl
Churchill, Simon Gray, who died this week at the age of 71, was not a
first-tier playwright, but he certainly did not dip below the second.
Best known in the United States for his 1971 comedy Butley, which
made a Broadway star out of Alan Bates and was revived on Broadway in 2006
with Nathan Lane in the title role, Gray's work brought the Wildean
comedy-of-manners into a world increasingly reluctant to embrace
his literate and sophisticated dialogue. Gray, like Terence Rattigan
before him, dove deep beneath the veneer of upper-middle-class,
articulate civility to find the broad violent rivers of anxiety and dread
that flow below. And the dialogue he created for his frequent
collaborators Bates and Pinter (who directed many of Gray's stage plays as
well as the 1974 film adaptation of Butley) was unerringly witty, caustic and
human.
Gray has been best known recently for his series of darkly comic
memoirs, including The Smoking Diaries, in which he described his
successful battle against alcoholism and his failed battle against
cigarettes. His other plays included The Common Pursuit,
Otherwise Engaged (a miraculously spare, savage and hilarious
inversion of E.M. Forster's adage, "Only connect"; Tom Courtenay played
the lead on Broadway in another Pinter-directed production, replaced
during the run by Dick Cavett, and what I wouldn't have given to see
either in the role) and Wise Child.
His work was a demonstration to me of the more sublime regions and
ambitions of the English comic spirit when I first saw Butley in
the mid-1970s, and it remains inspiring. (You don't have to listen
long to my own play In Public before you can hear a faint, thin
echo or two of Gray's milieu and language.) Fortunately, Pinter's film of
the play retains its razor-sharp edge over thirty years after its
first release, as well as capturing Alan Bates' performance for posterity
and featuring a delightful Jessica Tandy as a priggish, paranoid and
Machiavellian university colleague. The wonder of the play is that, at its
finish, Gray and Bates manage to find a gleam of redemption and profound
compassion for a thoroughly unpleasant, vicious human specimen – and
in its final few minutes underscore the redemptive power of poetry,
humanist education and civilisation themselves as well.
Simon Gray, an unapologetically commercial playwright, was among the
last of a vanishing breed, writing plays not for children nor for adults
stuck and deliberately wallowing in a permanent adolescence and crippled
by a culture-industry-induced attention deficit disorder, but
for grown-ups painfully chastened by experience and history who
nonetheless paradoxically retain, within their pessimism, a tender,
zealously guarded and realistic hope. A full obituary is
available via the Guardian here; also at the Guardian, Lyn Gardner has
this appreciation.
Posted at 12.15 pm in /RIP
Permanent link to this story
Thursday, 07 August 2008
Two Quotes
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that
crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path
under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the
gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the
offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage
beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his
woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his
arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames
the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the
tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a
state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost,
when 'tis hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing
rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing
that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from
baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.
Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now
to evil, now to good. When he honours the laws of the land, and that
justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his
city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin. Never may he
share my hearth, never think my thoughts, who doth these things!
Sophocles, Antigone, c. 442 BC
Life is beautiful, but the world is hell.
Harold Pinter, interview, 2006
Posted at 9.20 am in /Quotes
Permanent link to this story
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