|
|
||
|
News
|
||
|
News |
Dateline: 5th July, 2005
Christopher Fry (1907 - 2005) Playwright Christopher Fry, who died on 30th June at the age of 97, was probably the last British playwright to make a successful career out of writing plays in verse. The Lady's Not for Burning (1948), probably his most successful play, was his fifth, preceded by The Boy with a Cart (1938), a play about St Cuthman commissioned by the Sussex vicar, The Tower (1939) for Tewkesbury Abbey, a religious drama The Firstborn in 1946 and A Phoenix Too Frequent, a one-act play performed at the Mercury Theatre (also1946). Lady, commissioned by the Arts Theatre, was part of a quartet of plays based around the seasons: Lady (spring), Venus Observed (1949: autumn), The Dark Is Light Enough (1954: winer) and A Yard of Sun (1970: summer). he also wrote plays with a religious theme, starting with Boy and The Firstborn and continuing with Thor with Angels (1948) and A Sleep of Prisoners (1951). He also produced translations of major modern French dramatists, including what became for many years the standard English versions of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon (1950) and The Lark (1955) and Tiger at the Gates (1955) by Jean Giraudoux. His plays - he claimed he owed much of his inspriation to T S Eliot - were enormously popular and attracted come of the best actors of the day. Lady featured John Gielgud, Claire Bloom and Richard Burton, whilst Paul Scofield appeared in A Phoenix Too Frequent and (with Claire Bloom) in Ring Round the Moon, his translation of Anouilh's L'Invitation au Château. Olivier and Vivien Leigh appeared in Venus Observed. By the late fifties he was thought of as outmoded: the arrival of John Osborne and the "angry young men" made him seem irrelevant, although he always said that he enjoyed Look Back in Anger but felt out of sympathy with the pessimism it represented. It is true that his blend of verse, wit and optimism could be thought to belong to another age, and yet his wit is as sharp as ever today: in just one play (Lady) we find such gems as "I could do with a splendid holiday in a complete vacuum" and "I am a black and frosted rosebud that the good God has preserved since last October." He also created comic masterpieces of characters, such as Skipps (also in Lady): "And if any of youse is not a miserable offender as he's told to be by almighty and mercerable God, then I says to 'im, ''Ands off my daughter, you bloody-minded heathen!'" He worked for three years as a teacher in a prep school, then for Barnardo's (for which he wrote a play about the doctor to be performed by the Young Helpers' League, and then became an actor, helping to found the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players (1932), for whom he directed the premiere of Shaw's Village Wooing. During the war, as a Quaker he was a conscientious objector and served in the Pioneer Corps, working on repairing bomb damage to Liverpool docks and London drains. He worked in film and TV, rewriting (without any screen credit) most of Ben Hur and writing the screenplay for John Huston's The Bible (1966). His most succesful television work was The Brontës of Haworth (1973). He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1962. The last play he wrote was A Ringing of Bells, which the National Theatre produced in 2001. for his old school His wife Phyllis Hart, whom he married in 1936, died in 1987. He is survived by their son Tam. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
|
|
|
|
