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Illusion and Reality Clash
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# : |
18226 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
2,164 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Among the slicker and more amusing British playwrights are Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and the increasingly solemn boulevardier Michael Frayn. He is a writer much admired as an intellectual and translator. His versions of Chekhov have often been superb; his own scripts exploit a deft and mildly acid strain of farce which has brought him success, not only on the stage but in films and television, with such films as Clock-wise. From the days when he was a newspaper columnist with the Guardian and the Observer, Frayn has shown himself to be the perfect middlebrow comedian - mining understated humor out of middle-class eccentricities and the pretensions of the yuppie subclass. But when his latest work, Look Look, opened at London's Aldwych Theatre in April, it was greeted by a near-unanimous chorus of sour reviews. The problem seems to be that this play, instead of mocking bourgeois pretension, is itself a weak, bland version of that very thing.
Solemn Turn
When he is in top form Frayn can be a pleasantly funny playwright; but this time a fit of folie des grandeurs has apparently pitched him from his jester's stool, head over heels into a turgid and rather shallow puddle of solemnity. The cause of such regrettable disasters must always be a mystery. But it is at least a reasonable guess that before writing Look Look, Frayn was seized by an attack of what I call Shakespeareitis; this is a common British ailment whose chief symptom is a compulsion to justify one's place in the-great-tradition-of-English-drama. A playwright in the grip of this disease tends to feel that he has an important idea to confer upon (not necessarily communicate to) the public. There is circumstantial evidence for this in Frayn's case, because he is
... (1996 of 12405 Characters)
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