Word: simpsons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...British playwright N. F. Simpson is not a raving lunatic, although that is the first impression his two plays give. On the contrary, Mr. Simpson is lucidly, frighteningly, overwhelmingly sane. His unblinking perception of the rationalized madness that we call human life misleads one at first into thinking his plays gibberish, but we soon perceive that they are not the products of a chimpanzee pecking away at a typewriter, beloved example of statisticians as the primate may be. A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole are the result of something as rare as chimps actually--rather than in imagination--at typewriters...
...Simpson who has advanced the proposition (in his One-Way Pendulum, not yet produced in this country) that if one weighing machine can speak your weight, five hundred weighing machines can sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Weighing machines that speak your weight are a phase of the twentieth-century American revolution that has not yet reached America, but the perfection of Simpson's repsonse to them, the carrying of lunacy to its amusingly disquieting end, elicited admiration and aroused high expectations for the two plays to be presented by Club 47 as its first production of the summer season...
...Hole, in its American premiere fully satisfies all the hopes that theatre news from Britain has excited in followers of avant-grade drama. It is one of those plays about which people disagree, disagree even as to what it is about. I would suggest that perhaps Simpson intends to supplement the venerable Bede, Trevelyan, Thornton Wilder, and The Times, as historian of Church, England, mankind, and the times. Early in the play (and in a manner reminiscent of some of Our Town's devices) he calls our attention to the large meaning he wants his play to have...
...yourself play, in which form and meaning are not obvious in the script. Such a play requires exceedingly skillful direction and acting if it is to appear coherent enough and meaningful enough for the spectator to want to puzzle about it and pour his own interpretation into the container Simpson has provided. (And it is a moderately flexible receptacle, although there are limits to how far the elastic will stretch.) On the basis of last night's dress rehearsal, the production appears fully to meet the demands of the script. Stephen Aaron has directed it splendidly, creating suspense where appropriate...
...under the rule of black men in Africa. "A death blow to the European community in Kenya," cried stunned Llewellyn R. Briggs, sometime R.A.F. Group Captain, Kenya landowner, and leader of the extremists in the London talks. At his 8,000-ft.-high home near Limuru, blond Farmer David Simpson sat staring into the flickering fireplace. "A bloody shame. This lovely country, 90% developed by European capital and sweat, is being completely buggered...