Word: frayne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is no such thing, alas, as a new play by Anton Chekhov, and certainly not one written in English rather than his native Russian. But Adapter Michael Frayn has achieved the satisfying illusion of one in Wild Honey, a dizzyingly funny romantic farce culled from Chekhov's untitled, and by most estimates unproducible, first extant play. Frayn is best known in the U.S. as the playwright of Noises Off, a slapstick send-up of British sex comedy, and Benefactors, a regretful recollection of the relations between two young professional couples. Wild Honey marries the wry and the rowdy strains...
...National smell just as strongly of the lamp. Both Clifford Odets' Golden Boy and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd lie open and inert on the stage, as if they were exams to be passed and not theatrical experiences to be shared. Only Wild Honey, Michael Frayn's free adaptation of a play Chekhov wrote when he was still a student, strikes vital sparks, and this because Frayn treats the text as an organism that can flower with care and pruning. At 21, Chekhov was already halfway toward being "Chekhovian"; he alternated comic and pathetic moods...
...Frayn has broken the play in two. The first half is all cellos and sad small talk ("If you think this place is dull when you're here you should be here when you're not here"); the second half is flat-out farce with the tincture of domestic tragedy coloring the night sky. Ian McKellen is fine as Platonov, the country schoolmaster whose bitter gaiety attracts women to him like flies to wild honey. But the true star of Christopher Morahan's production-and, these days, of the entire National Theater-is Designer John Gunter...
Australian-born director who had staged Frayn's 1980 comedy Make and Break as well as several notable productions at Britain's National Theater. Blakemore came up with such good suggestions for staging that Frayn rewrote most of the play. It worked. Noises Off opened sensationally in London two years ago and has been playing to packed houses ever since...
...Broadway players were suitably daunted by the exacting precision of Blakemore's instructions and Frayn's stage directions (the script for the second act has two columns to describe the simultaneous goings-on of the two farces). Says Actress Deborah Rush, who plays a spaced-out tax auditor in Nothing On: 'They knew just how many breaths were required between the opening and closing of a door." Brian Murray, the beleaguered director of Nothing On, recalls that just before rehearsals began, "Michael Blakemore called us together and told us that in two weeks we'd wish...