Afterlife
Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
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Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
In a metatheatrical comedy, the characters watch the audience and expect it to perform; the playwright is also seated among the spectators, whose habits become the joke.
In an alternate-history Britain ruled by a communist revolution, a commune of writers lives in poor conditions at Balmoral. Their uneasy routine is disrupted when a Russian capitalist journalist arrives to interview a missing author.
Benefactors is a 1984 play by Michael Frayn. It is set in the 1960s and concerns an idealistic architect David and his wife Jane and their relationship with the cynical Colin and his wife Sheila. David is attempting to build some new homes to replace the slum housing of Basuto Road and is gradually forced by circumstances into building skyscrapers despite his initial aversion to these. This is set against the backdrop of 1960s new housing projects. Sheila becomes his secretary but it is unclear if she is helping him or the other way around. As the title of the play suggests it is about helping people and explores some of the difficulties inherent in this or in being helped.
Three spirits come together to try to apprehend and explain one simple question: "Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen?" The rest of the play details information around this subject through argument and interjections. Heisenberg – "No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I've explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I've explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt." Along the way, Heisenberg and Bohr "draft" several versions of their 1941 exchange, arguing about the ramifications of each potential version of their meeting and the motives behind it. They discuss the idea of nuclear power and its control, the rationale behind building or not building an atomic bomb, the uncertainty of the past and the inevitability of the future as embodiments of themselves acting as particles drifting through the atom that is Copenhagen.
Based on actual events, the play follows West German chancellor Willy Brandt's decision about whether to expose Günter Guillaume, a spy serving as his secretary with access to state secrets.
Donkeys' Years is a play by English playwright Michael Frayn that premiered at the Globe Theatre, London, in 1976. The play is a West End farce, a genre that Frayn parodied five years later in his play within a play "Nothing On" from Noises Off. The play featured Penelope Keith, who subsequently won the 1976 Olivier Award for Best Comedy Performance.
A young couple move into a new flat and repeatedly argue about how they make decisions.
Each of the three acts of Noises Off contains a performance of the first act of a play within a play, a sex farce called Nothing On. The three acts of Noises Off are each named "Act One" on the contents page of the script, though they are labelled normally in the body of the script, and the programme for Noises Off will include, provided by the author, a comprehensive programme for the Weston-super-Mare run of Nothing On, including spoof advertisements (for sardines) and acknowledgments to the providers of mysterious props that do not actually appear (e.g. stethoscope, hospital trolley, and straitjacket). Nothing is seen of the rest of Nothing On except for the ending of its Act 2. Nothing On is the type of farce in which young women run about in their underwear, men drop their trousers, and many doors continually bang open and shut. It is set in "a delightful 16th-century posset mill", modernised by the current owners and available to let while they are abroad; the fictional playwright is appropriately named Robin Housemonger. Act One is set at the dress rehearsal at the (fictional) Grand Theatre in Weston-super-Mare. It is midnight, the night before the first performance and the cast are hopelessly unready. Baffled by entrances and exits, missed cues, missed lines, and bothersome props, including several plates of sardines, they drive Lloyd, their director, into a seething rage and back several times during the run. Act Two shows a Wednesday matinée performance one month later, at the Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne. (Designed by Frank Matcham in 1891, the Theatre Royal, Ashton-under-Lyne was demolished in 1963.) In this act, the play is seen from backstage, providing a view that emphasises the deteriorating relationships between the cast. Romantic rivalries, lovers' tiffs and personal quarrels lead to offstage shenanigans, onstage bedlam and the occasional attack with a fire axe. Act Three depicts a performance near the end of the ten-week run, at the (fictional) Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees. Relationships between the cast have soured considerably, the set is breaking down and props are winding up in the wrong hands, on the floor, and in the way. The actors remain determined at all costs to cover up the mounting chaos, but it is not long before the plot has to be abandoned entirely and the more coherent characters are obliged to take a lead in ad-libbing towards some sort of end. Much of the comedy emerges from the subtle variations in each version as character flaws play off each other off-stage to undermine on-stage performance, with a great deal of slapstick. The contrast between players' on-stage and off-stage personalities is also a source of comic dissonance.
Michael Frayn’s stage adaptation combines four short stories and four one-act plays by Anton Chekhov into a composite theatrical work.
A four-part cycle for two actors: a young couple on holiday with a new baby; an inebriated older woman visited by a younger suitor; an Englishman whose twitching foot seems to have a better relationship with him than his wife does; and a catastrophic dinner party in which the two performers play all the guests.
Michael Frayn adapts Chekhov's untitled early five-hour drama, commonly known in English as Platonov after its central character, Mikhail Platonov, a disillusioned provincial schoolmaster.
Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
In a metatheatrical comedy, the characters watch the audience and expect it to perform; the playwright is also seated among the spectators, whose habits become the joke.
In an alternate-history Britain ruled by a communist revolution, a commune of writers lives in poor conditions at Balmoral. Their uneasy routine is disrupted when a Russian capitalist journalist arrives to interview a missing author.
Benefactors is a 1984 play by Michael Frayn. It is set in the 1960s and concerns an idealistic architect David and his wife Jane and their relationship with the cynical Colin and his wife Sheila. David is attempting to build some new homes to replace the slum housing of Basuto Road and is gradually forced by circumstances into building skyscrapers despite his initial aversion to these. This is set against the backdrop of 1960s new housing projects. Sheila becomes his secretary but it is unclear if she is helping him or the other way around. As the title of the play suggests it is about helping people and explores some of the difficulties inherent in this or in being helped.
Three spirits come together to try to apprehend and explain one simple question: "Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen?" The rest of the play details information around this subject through argument and interjections. Heisenberg – "No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I've explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I've explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt." Along the way, Heisenberg and Bohr "draft" several versions of their 1941 exchange, arguing about the ramifications of each potential version of their meeting and the motives behind it. They discuss the idea of nuclear power and its control, the rationale behind building or not building an atomic bomb, the uncertainty of the past and the inevitability of the future as embodiments of themselves acting as particles drifting through the atom that is Copenhagen.
Based on actual events, the play follows West German chancellor Willy Brandt's decision about whether to expose Günter Guillaume, a spy serving as his secretary with access to state secrets.
Donkeys' Years is a play by English playwright Michael Frayn that premiered at the Globe Theatre, London, in 1976. The play is a West End farce, a genre that Frayn parodied five years later in his play within a play "Nothing On" from Noises Off. The play featured Penelope Keith, who subsequently won the 1976 Olivier Award for Best Comedy Performance.
A young couple move into a new flat and repeatedly argue about how they make decisions.
Each of the three acts of Noises Off contains a performance of the first act of a play within a play, a sex farce called Nothing On. The three acts of Noises Off are each named "Act One" on the contents page of the script, though they are labelled normally in the body of the script, and the programme for Noises Off will include, provided by the author, a comprehensive programme for the Weston-super-Mare run of Nothing On, including spoof advertisements (for sardines) and acknowledgments to the providers of mysterious props that do not actually appear (e.g. stethoscope, hospital trolley, and straitjacket). Nothing is seen of the rest of Nothing On except for the ending of its Act 2. Nothing On is the type of farce in which young women run about in their underwear, men drop their trousers, and many doors continually bang open and shut. It is set in "a delightful 16th-century posset mill", modernised by the current owners and available to let while they are abroad; the fictional playwright is appropriately named Robin Housemonger. Act One is set at the dress rehearsal at the (fictional) Grand Theatre in Weston-super-Mare. It is midnight, the night before the first performance and the cast are hopelessly unready. Baffled by entrances and exits, missed cues, missed lines, and bothersome props, including several plates of sardines, they drive Lloyd, their director, into a seething rage and back several times during the run. Act Two shows a Wednesday matinée performance one month later, at the Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne. (Designed by Frank Matcham in 1891, the Theatre Royal, Ashton-under-Lyne was demolished in 1963.) In this act, the play is seen from backstage, providing a view that emphasises the deteriorating relationships between the cast. Romantic rivalries, lovers' tiffs and personal quarrels lead to offstage shenanigans, onstage bedlam and the occasional attack with a fire axe. Act Three depicts a performance near the end of the ten-week run, at the (fictional) Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees. Relationships between the cast have soured considerably, the set is breaking down and props are winding up in the wrong hands, on the floor, and in the way. The actors remain determined at all costs to cover up the mounting chaos, but it is not long before the plot has to be abandoned entirely and the more coherent characters are obliged to take a lead in ad-libbing towards some sort of end. Much of the comedy emerges from the subtle variations in each version as character flaws play off each other off-stage to undermine on-stage performance, with a great deal of slapstick. The contrast between players' on-stage and off-stage personalities is also a source of comic dissonance.
Michael Frayn’s stage adaptation combines four short stories and four one-act plays by Anton Chekhov into a composite theatrical work.
A four-part cycle for two actors: a young couple on holiday with a new baby; an inebriated older woman visited by a younger suitor; an Englishman whose twitching foot seems to have a better relationship with him than his wife does; and a catastrophic dinner party in which the two performers play all the guests.
Michael Frayn adapts Chekhov's untitled early five-hour drama, commonly known in English as Platonov after its central character, Mikhail Platonov, a disillusioned provincial schoolmaster.