Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (7), Female (3), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...Butley 'What is so wondrous about a play so basically defeatist and hurtful is its ability to be funny. The stark, unsentimental approach to the homosexual relationship, the cynical send-up of academic...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 6, Roles: Total (8), Female (2), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Cell Mates takes as its central characters the spy George Blake and the Irish petty criminal Sean Bourke, who sprang Blake from Wormwood Scrubs prison. It tracks their relationship from their first meeting in prison to their hide-out...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (8), Female (4), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...'Close of Play is, I suppose, the darkest of Simon's plays. It was never appreciated by the critical fraternity, which failed to understand it for what it was – a radical exploration of poetic drama. Its range of operation, its sleight...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 4, Roles: Total (4), Female (2), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...'We’ve got a sociologist called Nuzek coming in this afternoon with his latest book. On Protestantism and Pornography.' Faced with such a prospect, Peter, the protagonist of this play, finds the idea of sitting at his desk...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 4, Roles: Total (6), Female (2), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...The newly acquired wardrobe filling most of the living room of the Godboys' decaying house in Shepherd's Bush really does seem unnecessarily large for most purposes. Eric and Doris upstairs could manage without one, surely. Whatever scheme...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (8), Female (3), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...Harry is a literary agent. Louise is a writer. They are young and happily married. As the play opens, we find them choosing a country house, an idyllic place where she can write, where small children will be happy, and where they can both...

Nick Hern Books, 2000

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (4), Female (2), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...Simon Gray’s Japes is a black comedy with an unusual slant on the classic love triangle. It was first performed at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, on 23 November 2000 before transferring to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, opening on 7...

Nick Hern Books, 1999

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 4, Roles: Total (3), Female (2), Male (1), Unassigned (0)

...Simon Gray’s Just the Three of Us is a play that mixes the comic with the macabre to explore ideas about love, both platonic and romantic. It was first performed by the Peter Hall Company at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, on 7 October 1997...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (5), Female (2), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...'Like a Henry James novella; circuitous, ambiguous, enthralling and chilling.' Financial Times on The Late Middle Classes...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Roles: Total (10), Female (3), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...Charles Dickens, forty-five years old and married, falls passionately in love with Nelly Ternan, an actress almost thirty years his junior. After a long affair which ends only with Dickens' death in 1870, Nelly marries and has two children,...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 7, Roles: Total (6), Female (2), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...'Molly is an adaptation for the stage of the earliest of my television plays – Death of a Teddy Bear – which was written for BBC's Wednesday Play… The source of Death of a Teddy Bear was the Alna Rattenbury case, an account of which I came...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (7), Female (2), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...'The hero of Otherwise Engaged only prefers brevity when he can't have complete silence – or rather a silence filled with music. Everything in the play flows from that simple fact, which can be confusing on the page unless the reader...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (7), Female (2), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...With much humour and an undercurrent of pathos, Quartermaine’s Terms looks at the lives and relationships of seven teachers who gravitate between classes to the faculty common room of their small British school for foreigners...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (7), Female (2), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...In 1975 Simon Gray wrote a play called Otherwise Engaged about a man (Simon Hench) who tries to keep the world at bay by pretending it doesn’t really exist. The world nevertheless keeps coming at him, in the form of his brother, his lodger,...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (5), Female (2), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...Simon Gray adapted Spoiled from a television play of the same name. The television version of Spoiled was first broadcast by the BBC on 28th August, 1968, as part of the Wednesday Play series. Spoiled...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 2, Roles: Total (4), Female (1), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...In his younger days, Robert Simon was a first-rate stage-manager in provincial rep. Now he keeps house for his West End actress wife, while amusing himself with lots of little sexual adventures. In fact, a thoroughly happy man. Until one...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (13), Female (5), Male (8), Unassigned (0)

...An adaptation of Moliere's classic, Tartuffe was first performed at The Kennedy Center, Washington DC, in May 1982. '[This] version of Tartuffe…was commissioned by the Kennedy Center, Washington, and performed in May 1982....

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 5, Roles: Total (6), Female (1), Male (5), Unassigned (0)

...'I finished this play at six this morning, having worked through half of the night. I'’d also worked through three packages of cigarettes and half a bottle of malt whisky. But the main thing is that it'’s finished. Olé. I numbered...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Roles: Total (12), Female (3), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...The Holy Terror: Melon Revised is a reworking of Simon Gray's earlier play Melon, originally performed in 1987. It was first performed on 15th February 1991 at the Temple of Arts Theatre, Tucson, Arizona...

Faber and Faber, 2010

Faber Drama

playtext

Acts: 2, Scenes: 16, Roles: Total (20), Female (6), Male (14), Unassigned (0)

...The Idiot is a dramatisation of Fyodor Dostoievsky’s original novel. In creating this stage play, Simon Gray chose some of the most vivid and contrasting episodes recounting the strange involvement between Prince Myshkin, the good natured...