Word: frayne
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...conferred its brand of wisdom, even the least perceptive person can look back and recognize how one misstep of fate led to another. Thus a hallmark of growing older is the increasing impact of memory, simultaneously spurring regret and reconciliation. Those conflicting impulses are at the heart of Michael Frayn's Benefactors. Its four characters, addressing the audience from the perspective of middle age, watch themselves in flashback as exuberantly misguided young adults. And although the play's nominal topics include high-rise architecture, neighborhood preservation, the sins of journalism and the legacy of imperialism, its real substance...
...Frayn is not so pretentious as to offer answers, but he strongly hints at a disaffected liberal's belief in the strength of the darker side of human nature. Benefactors is foremost a comedy, albeit a disillusioned one, and it makes its statements with jokes. In the shrewdest of them, the nurse, the one character who is not a university graduate, recognizes the architect's walled-in housing proposal as a variation of a college, turning its back on the rest of the world. Hurt's performance in the role, tinged equally with self-pity and pluck, is the production...
Britain's most versatile man of letters was once the fledgling rebel with a cause. When Michael Frayn was a schoolboy in the late 1940s, he and a friend "discovered the revolutionary tradition. We ran an unofficial Marxist cell, and I described myself as a Communist." Frayn's widowed father, an asbestos salesman and orthodox Laborite, was not amused. He declared that higher education was rubbish and that Michael should leave school to become a sales trainee. The son, more mole than firebrand, slowly undermined that plan and found his way to Cambridge, first as an army recruit sent...
Those Cambridge encounters further propelled Frayn away from asbestos sales and into an exemplary career as journalist, novelist and playwright. While still an undergraduate, he contributed to the premier humor magazine Punch. Straight out of school, he wrote news and columns for the Manchester Guardian and then the Observer. Turning to fiction, he produced five deft, whimsical novels centered on class conflicts and old school ties. In the past decade he has emerged as one of Britain's leading playwrights. His glimpse of backstage pandemonium, Noises Off, was a Broadway hit two seasons ago. Seven earlier scripts have been produced...
Part of the problem may be the American cast, headed by the stolid, uncharismatic James Naughton as Brandt and by Richard Thomas, too transparently fake and obsequious as Güillaume. But Frayn hasn't done his part to turn this political drama into an involving personal one. We never understand why Brandt, who scorns Güillaume at the outset, is won over by him, and thus we don't fully register the human tragedy of his betrayal. Even that treachery seems kind of piddly. Maybe the cold war is already too distant for us to appreciate why Güillaume...