Word: frayne
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...Michael Frayn...
Farce is the art of not keeping madness at bay. Michael Frayn has written an insanely funny play on precisely that premise. Act I of Noises Off consists of the dress rehearsal of Act I of Nothing On, a play that is about to tour the provinces. The set is a cheerfully bright living room with stairs leading up to bedrooms and a clothes closet. The house appears to be deserted. But no, Mrs. Clacket (Patricia Routledge), the housekeeper, is on the premises. Routledge is a one-woman aviary, walking, cawing and almost flying like a bird...
Utley could be a sentimental family favorite: he is the son of NBC Chicago Correspondent Clifton Utley and former NBC Reporter Frayn Utley. He is also an experienced newsman. Utley's relaxed, occasionally eloquent style apparently appealed to Today watchers. His mail is running 1,010 pro, only...
False Security. This sort of thing, or something very like it, has been done often enough before, from H. G. Wells' time machines to Stanley Kubrick's space odyssey. Moreover, Frayn's first sentence-"Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber"-gets the whole thing off to a bad start. Sure enough, Uncumber has a mother called Frideswide and a father called Aelfric. The coyly chosen names and the uneasy use of the future tense suggest a particularly tiresome and traditionally British kind of whimsy...
...Frayn employs the whimsy with considerable cunning, soothing the reader into a false sense of security. Creating a kind of Alice in Wonderland in reverse, he shows a powerful and peculiar imagination. Like Alice, Uncumber leaves her safe, dull, comfortable home. But where Alice retreats down a tunnel from a world of horsehair sofas and bullying grownups, Uncumber escapes onto the surface of the earth itself. Like Alice, she is both alarmed and enraptured by what she finds. Her first stunted blade of grass delights her. She sits entranced for hours, watching oily, scum-covered waves lapping at a blackened...