Simon Gray – författare

The Pig Trade, Japes Too, Michael, The Holy TerrorThe Pig Trade is set in 1937 in the Villa of I Tatti outsider Florence where, under the menacing shadow of Mussolini, a famous art historian and a notorious art dealer have an explosive final encounter. Japes Too and Michael are companion plays, in which the love of two brothers for one woman both highlights and obscures their dependency on each other but where fate and tragedy strike differently. Simon Gray's play Melon, which follows a publisher into his nervous breakdown and out again, enjoyed great success in the West End but, dissatisfied with the work, Gray revised it so thoroughly that a new play with the same central character emerged, entitled The Holy Terror.This volume also contains a brief chronicle by the author on the gestation of his work and the impossibility of writing. 'Simon Gray is actually one of the most accessible, elegant and tender of contemporary writers. He is also, both on stage and on the printed page, laugh-out-loud funny.' Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph'Gray's plays, funny and sad, have a savage honesty at their heart.' Mail on Sunday

'A masterly portrayal of an innocent.' Harold Pinter, from 'Directing Simon Gray's Plays', Simon Gray Plays 1'Superficially, it is a light comedy about a group of educated, often eccentric English characters in an academic backwater in the early sixties. But though the jokes are excellent, the piece cuts deep. There are Strindberg-like glimpses of wretchedly unhappy marriages and, as in Ibsen, a sense of chickens coming home to roost. But the primary impression here is of an English Chekhov. As in the plays of the Russian master, the characters talk a lot, but they rarely listen, still less understand, so they are often at cross-purposes. And like The Seagull, the long time scheme in Quartermaine's Terms - it spans several years - creates a poignant sense of transience and mortality.' Daily Telegraph'Gray's selection of details and exchanges is immaculate: he achieves drama and mystery in mundane lives; the comedy is beautifully stated and even personal tragedies are underlined with running gags that ring with truthfulness. No false hothouse effect is necessary to make bare the bewilderment of spirit of his central figure, the grinning, forgetful and deeply kind staff lecturer, St John Quartermaine, an inarticulate character of awesome loneliness who rivals the tragic force of Willy Loman.' The Times 'A play that is at once full of doom and gloom and bristling with wry, even uproarious comedy. The mixture is so artfully balanced that we really don't know where the laughter ends and the tears begin: the playwright is in full possession of the Chekhovian territory where the tragedies and absurdities of life become one and the same.' New York Times

'Sharp, funny and clever . . . What a pleasure to re-encounter a play that combines unabashed intelligence and zinging wit with a rare generosity of spirit.'Daily Telegraph on The Common Pursuit'Gray's stature as one of the handful of great tragi-comic English dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century would appear now to be undisputed.' Howard Jacobson, Critical QuarterlyHidden Laughter'A sad divine comedy, superbly written. Gray nurses his characters and cares for them, but he never pampers them, or pities them, or presumes to use them as his spokesman. In this respect, he has become an English Chekhov... At the same time, Gray dispenses some of the incandescent malice and moral savagery of Coward at his acid best... But, of course, comparisons can only help you get your bearings. Gray is entirely his own man in this painful, querulous, warm, hard and mature play.' Sunday Times

'The brave little lives that Gray so compassionately illuminates could be lived by any of us, and that's why they arouse emotions that are anything but small.'New York Times on Quartermaine's Terms

Butley 'What is so wondrous about a play so basically defeatist and hurtful is its ability to be funny. The stark, unsentimental approach to the homosexual relationship, the cynical send-up of academic life, the skeptical view of the teacher-pupil associations are all stunningly illuminated by continuous explosions of sardonic, needling, feline, vituperative and civilised lines.' Evening Standard

'A superbly written play, a funny play, an agonising play. It is, moreover, a play of truth and insight. A play to savour.' Punch on Otherwise Engaged'Life in the theatre hasn't brought me anything more rewarding than directing Simon Gray's plays.' Harold PinterPlaintiffs and DefendantsExceptionally good... the play gave such a rending picture of married mess that it was hard to know where to look.' Clive James, Observer'Simon Gray is the one [TV playwright] whose work I most relish seeing for his acerbic wit, wonderful ironies and above all for his care with our mother tongue.' Dennis Potter

Spies betray people. That's what we do. It becomes a - a habit. Difficult to break - even when it's not - not strictly necessary.Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, 1961. One of Britain's most notorious double agents, George Blake, is serving a forty-two year sentence when he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Irish petty criminal, Sean Bourke. Both men are eccentric outsiders. Each sees in each other the possibility of escape and not just from prison. But once on the outside their mutual dependence faces mounting pressures from MI5, the KGB and indeed from themselves.Simon Gray's absorbing and deftly funny play explores how personal freedom is an illusion and how even friendship must have careful boundaries in a world where deception is a reflex response.Cell Mates premiered at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, in January 1995 before transferring to the Albery Theatre, London. The play was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in November 2017.

Isolated university professor Simon Hench, completely and selfishly otherwise engaged in listening to a new recording "Parsifal" is continually interrupted by students, friends, lovers and life.2 women, 5 men

A very English modern play, reeking of real tragedy, real humour and real life. The Common Pursuit chronicles the erosion of the ambitions of a smug, elitist group of Cambridge frien's. Stuart is editor of a literary magazine and the pursuit of excellence is shown to be economically a bad proposition in this world. The magazine collapses and the characters' fates vary as the play proceeds. An ironic epilogue returns to the early days in Cambridge with the young people planning their futures.1 woman, 5 men

Here is a hilarious look at the artistic pretensions of the young and the rich that charts a decade in the life of a London family transplanted to an idyllic country setting. A literary agent and his wife buy a Devon cottage where she can write, children will be happy, and they can relax. Into their world walks the local vicar a classically comic character who tends their magnificent garden and their emotional if not spiritual needs as the outside world intrudes with failure and disillusionment.-3 women, 5 men

This celebrated English drama by the author of Butley and Otherwise Engaged is based on a famous murder case involving a lonely divorced woman who has married a man thirty years her senior. However, his age and increasing deafness make her lonelier than before, and in desperation she takes up with a young man who has been hired as a gardener. He falls for her and, in a moment of passion, kills her husband with a pair of garden shears.|2 women, 4 men

Never has the celebrated author of Butley and Otherwise Engaged been more amusing and more touching than in this thoroughly delightful portrait of a mediocre but lovable English schoolteacher named St. John Quartermaine and his fellow faculty at a small school in Cambridge which teaches English to foreigners.2 women, 5 men

Stage Struck, an inventive thriller that employs a handful of actors to play chameleon like parts within parts, opens in the living room of one Robert Simon. Formerly a first rate stage manager in a provincial repertory company, he now he keeps house for his West End actress wife while amusing himself with various sexual adventures. He is a thoroughly happy man until the clumsy intervention of a psychiatrist destroys his happiness and his marriage. He plans a hideous revenge on his wife and the psychiatrist a reveng, which allows him to rediscover all his old talents.1 woman, 3 men

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries was the result, in which one of Britain's most beloved and original writers reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.

Spies betray people. That's what we do. It becomes a - a habit. Difficult to break - even when it's not - not strictly necessary.Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, 1961. One of Britain's most notorious double agents, George Blake, is serving a forty-two year sentence when he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Irish petty criminal, Sean Bourke. Both men are eccentric outsiders. Each sees in each other the possibility of escape and not just from prison. But once on the outside their mutual dependence faces mounting pressures from MI5, the KGB and indeed from themselves.Simon Gray's absorbing and deftly funny play explores how personal freedom is an illusion and how even friendship must have careful boundaries in a world where deception is a reflex response.Cell Mates premiered at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, in January 1995 before transferring to the Albery Theatre, London. The play was revived at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in November 2017.