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Home > RIP
Thursday, 07 August 2008
RIP: Simon Gray
Simon Gray, 1936-2008
(Photo: Linda Nylind)
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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Home > RIP
Monday, 18 February 2008
RIP: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Speaking of the new French novel and voyeurs, word comes via the BBC of
the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet at the age of 85. His novels
included The Voyeur and The Erasers; Robbe-Grillet also wrote the
screenplay for the haunting and, to some, maddeningly opaque Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain
Resnais.
Posted at 4.57 pm in /RIP
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