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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
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10 / 1990 |
2,164 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
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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 known to have published a book of philosophy in 1974. I did not read the book, but the title is ominous. It is called Constructions. The Times profile of Frayn, published just before the play opened, was headlined "A Philosopher Speaks," and offered a couple of quotes: The metaphorability of the universe is bottomless. Everything can be pressed into service in its turn to stand for something else.
This ringing truism was followed by another reverently cited excerpt, on the experience of writing: The essence of the story is that the audience doesn't participate. Things roll forward ineluctably….We see a world from which we are absent.
It may have been the latter bit of resonance that tempted Frayn into the game of juxtaposing the real and the unreal, making the characters in Look Look jump back and forth, so to speak, between theatrical fact and fiction. In this case the "fact" consists of an onstage theater "audience," while the "fiction" is a briefly glimpsed play-within the play which is being watched by the "audience." In the first of two acts, Frayn presents a set consisting of several rows of stall seats which face the auditorium, so that the real audience is, so to speak, confronted with another "audience" onstage.
A dozen or so of these onstage spectators, while giving fitful attention to the imagined play-within-the-play, act out a set of individual vignettes, not unlike review sketches: a homosexual schoolmaster hopes to seduce a boy student who has come to the theater with him; a businessman hopes to get his secretary into bed after the show; a mother and father try unsuccessfully to control their rebellious teenage daughter (who eventually takes up with the boy
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