Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.

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

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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

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