Word: frayne
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Although deeply personal, this work invites comparisons: with Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, Michael Frayn's Benefactors and, above all, David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, which is more animated and bitter in its glimpse of the film business but not as involving. Like Stoppard and Frayn but unlike Mamet, Williamson has the daring to write about artists who are actually artistic -- sincere and good at what they do. His fable ends ambiguously for all parties, but with a whiff of genuine tragedy. -- W.A.H...
...finest revival on any London stage is an Uncle Vanya (translated by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore) that does justice to both Chekhov's hearty humor and his compassionate sadness at the waste of frustrated lives. It perceives the play's dominant tone not as lethargy but as furious, tragically misdirected energy. As Vanya, Michael Gambon demonstrates anew why he has come to be regarded as perhaps Britain's foremost stage actor. Alternately raging and lapsing into bathos, bubbling with kindness as he worsens the lives of those he most means to help, he embodies the tragedy...
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...
When Chekhov, then 21, finished the play, he brought it to an actress. After the play was rejected, perhaps because its diffuse narrative would take six to seven hours to stage, he destroyed his manuscript. Another copy, found after his death, has given rise to several adaptations. Frayn's, which lasts 2 1/2 hours, shifts the focus from the leading lady to a man, the schoolteacher Platonov, and provides a wondrous star turn for Ian McKellen, who won a 1981 Tony Award for his portrayal of Salieri in Amadeus...
WILD HONEY Chekhov's first play, shrewdly revamped by Michael Frayn...