Simon Gray
Simon James Holliday Gray was a notable English playwright recognized for his sharp wit and acerbic humor. Born during World War II, he spent significant time in both Canada and England, receiving an education that included studies at Cambridge University. Gray began his literary career with novels but found greater success in television and stage plays, particularly with works like "Butley," which explores the complexities of personal relationships through the lens of a cynical university teacher. His plays are characterized by intricate characterizations and clever dialogue, often reflecting themes of communication difficulties and the unpredictable nature of sexuality. Gray's dramatic style has drawn comparisons to contemporaries such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter, and his works frequently center on the lives of middle-class figures within academia and publishing. Critics have noted a thematic repetition in his writing, but Gray's ability to blend humor with serious subject matter has solidified his place in modern theater. His adaptation of Molière's "Tartuffe" further showcases his literary influences and stylistic affinities.
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Simon Gray
English playwright
- Born: October 21, 1936
- Birthplace: Hayling Island, Hampshire, England
- Died: August 6, 2008
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Simon James Holliday Gray was one of the wittiest and most comically acerbic of modern English playwrights. As a child, he was sent to stay with relatives in Canada during World War II before returning to England to complete a public school education at Westminster. His family then returned to Canada, where Gray spent three years at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Afterward, he returned to Europe, where he studied English literature at Clermont-Ferrand in France and also, for eight years, at Cambridge University. From 1963 to 1964, he spent more time in Canada as an instructor of English at the University of British Columbia. Gray’s sharp eye for the peculiar manners and idiosyncrasies of English social life has, therefore, been sharpened by lengthy stays in other countries. In 1964, he married Beryl Mary Kevern, and in 1965 he accepted a post as lecturer in English at the University of London, where he remained until 1985. {$S[A]Reade, Hamish;Gray, Simon}
Gray’s writing career started with a series of largely unmemorable novels, followed by his much more successful television plays. One of these, Death of a Teddy Bear, based upon the Alma Rattenbury murder case of the 1930’s (an oppressed wife murders her impotent husband), won Gray the British Writers Guild Award. Gray rewrote the play for the stage as Molly, but the stage version was, by Gray’s own admission, not as artistically successful.
Yet it was as a writer of stage plays that Gray made his name. His plays seem an amalgam of the thematic and stylistic dramatic trends of the new dramatic era that began in 1956 with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. He has been frequently compared with Osborne, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Early plays such as Wise Child, Dutch Uncle, and Spoiled evoke the bizarreness of Orton’s black farce; the title character of Butley drew immediate critical comparison with the angry Jimmy Porter of Osborne’s history-making play; still other plays such as Quartermaine’s Terms, Close of Play, and Otherwise Engaged echo the silent battles of Pinter’s plays. If biting wit or difficulty of communication characterize these dramas, it is the brilliant dialogue of Stoppard’s high comedies of ideas that appears in still others, such as The Common Pursuit. Two distinctive features mark the development of Gray’s career: his concern with academia and the publishing world as frequent subjects for his plays, and his long association with Pinter as director and Alan Bates as lead actor.
Butley was Gray’s first big success, both on stage and in the film version that followed. It is the story of a sardonic university teacher of English literature who takes delight in taunting and patronizing his students, his colleagues, and his wife. Butley is a literary descendant of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Directly opposite Butley is Hench, a publisher and the main character in Otherwise Engaged. As passive as Butley is aggressive, Hench allows his emotional detachment from people to determine events in his life, to the extent that he prefers listening to classical music rather than troubling himself about his wife’s adultery or a friend’s suicide. Both stage productions featured Bates in the leading roles and Pinter as director.
Gray’s plays, although always well crafted, generally rely upon a minimum of plot. Instead, he concentrates upon complex characterizations and sharp, literate, psychologically aggressive, and humorous dialogue. Gray’s basic theme is the difficulty of personal relationships, the ways in which caustic intelligence can impede emotional communication. Quartermaine’s Terms is set in a language school; it shows how words can get in the way of what people need to say. Gray also often writes about the unpredictable nature of sexuality, and how latent or repressed sexual eccentricities can bring about unexpected tensions within human relationships.
Critics of Gray’s work have charged that it is thematically repetitive and tends to focus upon a very narrow section of metropolitan society. Indeed, most of Gray’s plays are populated with middle-class figures from the worlds of publishing, journalism, and academic life. One play that moved radically away from this milieu was not a commercial success: The Rear Column, which features a band of British army officers stranded in the Congo in the wake of Henry Stanley’s advances into Africa in the late nineteenth century. The Rear Column is a fascinating exploration of the psychological tensions that build when one waits expectantly for events. The play demonstrates Gray’s affiliation with those worlds of ennui and frustration charted in a more abstract way by Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Usually, however, Gray chose to represent these frustrations within a more comically recognizable (and therefore commercially viable) framework. In 1982, Gray wrote a version of Molière’s Tartuffe for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The shadow of Molière’s urbane bitterness can be seen lurking over Gray’s own dramas as well. The charges of frivolity and narrowness of scope have been leveled at Molière, and also at Henry James, whom Gray studied while a postgraduate student at Cambridge; like these more famous authors, Gray employed stylish intelligence and humor to compensate for any limitations of perspective.
Bibliography
Blaydes, Sophia B. “Literary Allusion as Satire in Simon Gray’s Butley.” Midwest Quarterly 18 (Summer, 1977): 374-391. Discusses the academic setting of Butley and concentrates on explicating some of the more obscure literary allusions. Includes an end note on the making and distribution of the film version in 1975.
Burkman, Katherine H., ed. Simon Gray: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992. An introduction and a chronology are followed by fourteen essays, a bibliography, and an index. This volume is the first book-length exploration of Gray’s work, from Wise Child to Hidden Laughter. Contains single-work essays, overviews, and articles on adaptations. The Holy Terror, a revision of Melon, which was produced in Arizona in 1991, is mentioned in the chronology but is not dealt with in the essays.
Nightengale, Benedict. “Notes from the Front Lines of Life.” The New York Times, September 20, 1992. Summarizes Gray’s career.
Nothof, Anne. “The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration.” Modern Drama 43, no. 1 (2000): 56-65. The essay portrays the artist as a disillusioned idealist whose degeneration (like that of the picture of Dorian Gray) is manifested in his plays, his protagonists, and his autobiographical notes.
Rich, Frank. “Stage: Simon Gray Play, The Common Pursuit.” The New York Times, October 20, 1986, p. C17. This first play since Quartermaine’s Terms is about Cambridge “litterateurs from twenty years ago.” Rich provides some history of the play’s New Haven tryout and change of directors, one of whom is Gray himself. Includes a description of the play’s staging.
Rusinko, Susan. British Drama, 1950 to the Present: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Includes an article assessing Gray’s plays.
Shafer, Yvonne. “Aristophanic and Chekhovian Structure in the Plays of Simon Gray.” Theater Studies 31/32 (1984/1985): 32-40. Deals extensively with Otherwise Engaged (whose central character is “a solitary searcher for order and peace in a chaotic world”) and Quartermaine’s Terms, with a Chekhovian atmosphere and a “central character moving through a landscape of incipient disaster, unable to take any action to save himself.”
Stafford, Tony J. “Simon Gray.” In British Playwrights, 1956-1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook, edited by William W. Demastes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. This entry has an excellent bibliography and fine descriptions of several of Gray’s plays along with critics’ responses and an overall assessment of his career.
Stern, Carol Simpson. “Gray, Simon.” In Contemporary Dramatists, edited by Thomas Riggs. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999. A thorough account of Gray’s work and his relationship with the British theater.