Word: frayn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Call ahead and reserve your tickets. The Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre production of "Noises Off" is a crowd-pleasing slapstick hit. Michael Frayn's well-written farce within a farce is miraculously pulled--and pushed--off by a talented company in its final play of the summer...
HRST nearly does the impossible in giving Frayn's script the dual-leveled comedic chaos it demands. "Noises Off" is a guaranteed evening of laughter, and ends the adventurous HRST season with a successful staging gamble. It is also the last chance Harvard audiences may have to claim recent graduates Fish, Guillory, Lithgow and Walling as their own before others discover them...
...meretricious easy-access audiovisual crud. In fact, a strain of cerebral artiness is suddenly proliferating in the mainstream, a funny autodeconstruction that in the past decade has moved from European literature (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), to West End theater (Michael Frayn's Noises Off), to quality American pop: it is at the core of The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, MTV's Beavis and Butt-head and the new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Last Action Hero. Such a fin-de-siecle moment: Schwarzenegger, the son of an Austrian Nazi, starring in a $70 million...
...reader finishes A Landing on the Sun feeling almost sucker-punched, albeit gently. The story allows Jessel to see their achievement of happiness, but the reader ultimately realizes the impossibility of happiness in Jessel's own life. The light touch of Frayn's clever humor makes Jessel's tragedy more poignant...
...Frayn gives a whimsical edge to Jessel's serious outlook--and succeeds winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently...