Donkeys' Years

Donkeys' Years PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350013307
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Michael Frayn's 'gorgeous farce' about a university reunion premiered thirty years ago at the Globe Theatre, London. Returning to the West End in a sparkling new production, it remains a classic comedy. Twenty years after graduation, six former students return to their university college for a reunion dinner. Whilst their lives may have had varying degrees of success, all are connected by a common past. Once locked in college for the night, the graduates begin to relive their youth, and old friendships, feuds - and the much-desired but absurdly proper Master's wife - come tumbling back into the present . . . 'The show reaches that plateau of comic bliss when it becomes physically impossible to stop laughing' Daily Telegraph 'The West End's summer gets off to an exhilarating start with the hilarious return of Michael Frayn's comedy Donkeys' Years' Sunday Express 'All the confidence of a serious comic masterpiece. Masterclass performances. This is one of the best revivals in the West End for years. Unmissable!' Sunday Times

Donkeys' Years

Donkeys' Years PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350013307
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Get Book Here

Book Description
Michael Frayn's 'gorgeous farce' about a university reunion premiered thirty years ago at the Globe Theatre, London. Returning to the West End in a sparkling new production, it remains a classic comedy. Twenty years after graduation, six former students return to their university college for a reunion dinner. Whilst their lives may have had varying degrees of success, all are connected by a common past. Once locked in college for the night, the graduates begin to relive their youth, and old friendships, feuds - and the much-desired but absurdly proper Master's wife - come tumbling back into the present . . . 'The show reaches that plateau of comic bliss when it becomes physically impossible to stop laughing' Daily Telegraph 'The West End's summer gets off to an exhilarating start with the hilarious return of Michael Frayn's comedy Donkeys' Years' Sunday Express 'All the confidence of a serious comic masterpiece. Masterclass performances. This is one of the best revivals in the West End for years. Unmissable!' Sunday Times

First & Last

First & Last PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350013331
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) One spring morning a quiet, shy man in his sixties sets out from Land's End to walk the length of his native land. He has never walked more than a dozen miles in his life before, his health is uncertain, his boots are new, and he is too diffident to talk to anyone he meets along the way. His slow, solitary progress up the spine of Britain is watched by an unseen audience - his family and friends at home. How far will he get before he is forced to give up? Is he being heroic or merely selfish? As the days of his absence go by the old alliances and quarrels inside the family shift and alter. What emerges is a story about the arbitrariness of human endeavour and about the tenacious complexity of human relationships; about one man's glimpse of the country he lives in; about courage and about love. First and Last was directed by Alan Dossor in a production for BBC television, with Joss Ackland as the walker.

Now You Know

Now You Know PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350013374
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times) Now You Know: "Frayn's light but serious, marvellous play, about official and unofficial secrets, about idle curiosity and investigative purpose" (Observer)

The Human Touch

The Human Touch PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1466829419
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
What do we really know? What are we in relation to the world around us? Here, the acclaimed playwright and novelist takes on the great questions of his career—and of our lives Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, without the fact of our smallness to give it scale? With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls "the oldest mystery": the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we? All of Frayn's novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head-on.

Copenhagen

Copenhagen PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135001320X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
'Michael Frayn's tremendous play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session' Sunday Times 'A profound and haunting meditation on the mysteries of human motivation' Independent 'Frayn has seized on a ral-life historical and scientific mystery. In 1941 the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the famous Uncertainty Principle about the movement of particles, and was at that time leading the Nazi's nuclear programme, went to visit his old boss and mentor, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. What was the purpose of his visit to Nazi-occupied Denmark? What did the two old friends say to each other, particularly bearing in mind that Bohr was both half-Jewish and a Danish patriot?... Frayn argues that just as it is impossible to be certain of the precise location of an electron, so it is impossible to be certain about the workings of the human mind... What is certain is that Frayn makes ideas zing and sing in this play' Daily Telegraph

Stage Directions

Stage Directions PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571249221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Stage Directions covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, Afterlife. It is also a reflection on his path into theatre: the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man and, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion. Whatever subjects he tackles, from the exploration of the atomic nucleus to the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn is never less than fascinating, delightfully funny and charming. This book encapsulates a lifetime's work and is guaranteed to be a firm favourite with his legions of fans around the world.

File On Frayn

File On Frayn PDF Author: Malcolm Page
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408152517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
"Frayn has the rare ability to construct farcical comedy around philosophical principles and the laughs and the ideas effortlessly intermesh" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Michael Frayn is a playwright, novelist, journalist and writer of screenplays. His most important plays included Copenhagen, Noises Off, Benefactors and Donkeys' Years. Writers-Files is an important series documenting the work of major dramatists of the last hundred years. Each volume contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of the writers' own comments on their work. "Methuen are to be congratulated on launching this series...extremely useful to theatre professionals as well as to students and teachers of drama" (David Bradby, Speech and Drama)

The Copenhagen Papers

The Copenhagen Papers PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466829435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. As more material emerged -- specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information -- actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work -- human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

My Father's Fortune

My Father's Fortune PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 142991873X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
For the first time, Michael Frayn, the "master of what is seriously funny,"* turns his humor and narrative genius on his own family's story, to re-create the world that made him who he is Whether he is deliriously funny or philosophically profound, as a novelist and a playwright Michael Frayn has concerned himself with the ordinary life lived by erring humans, which is always more extraordinary than people think. In My Father's Fortune, Frayn reveals the original exemplar of the extraordinary-ordinary life: his father, Tom Frayn. A clever lad, a roofing salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted from a childhood spent in two rooms with six other people, all of them deaf. And undaunted he stayed, through German rockets, feckless in-laws, and his own increasing deafness; through the setback of a son as bafflingly slow-witted as the father was quick on his feet; through the shockingly sudden tragedy that darkened his life. Tom Frayn left his son little more than three watches and two ink-and-wash prints. But the true fortune he passed on was the great humor and spirit revealed in this beguiling memoir. * Anthony Burgess

Collected Columns

Collected Columns PDF Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571328903
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
One of the funniest writers of his generation, Michael Frayn has been writing humorous newspaper columns since 1959, principally for the "Guardian" and "Observer", and originally came to prominence as the thrice weekly purveyor of these short, surreal, razor-sharp explorations of human foibles, sex, politics, manners, and the events of the day. This volume brings together 110 of his finest and funniest pieces from over the years, selected and introduced by Michael Frayn himself, and is an unmissable treat for the many fans of his unique comic voice, as well as a revelation for fans of the award-winning literary novels and plays of his later career.