Search results for ""author simon gray""

'A superbly written play, a funny play, an agonising play. It is, moreover, a play of truth and insight. A play to savour.' Punch on Otherwise Engaged'Life in the theatre hasn't brought me anything more rewarding than directing Simon Gray's plays.' Harold PinterPlaintiffs and DefendantsExceptionally good... the play gave such a rending picture of married mess that it was hard to know where to look.' Clive James, Observer'Simon Gray is the one [TV playwright] whose work I most relish seeing for his acerbic wit, wonderful ironies and above all for his care with our mother tongue.' Dennis Potter

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Butley 'What is so wondrous about a play so basically defeatist and hurtful is its ability to be funny. The stark, unsentimental approach to the homosexual relationship, the cynical send-up of academic life, the skeptical view of the teacher-pupil associations are all stunningly illuminated by continuous explosions of sardonic, needling, feline, vituperative and civilised lines.' Evening Standard

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'The brave little lives that Gray so compassionately illuminates could be lived by any of us, and that's why they arouse emotions that are anything but small.'New York Times on Quartermaine's Terms

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Coda is Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggled to come to terms with terminal lung cancer. Darkly comic depictions of the medical team are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with his beloved wife, Victoria. Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's Coda is as life-affirming as it is heart-rending. Sadly, Coda was published posthumously: Gray died in August 2008.

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As a baby, Simon Gray discovered that he could move his pram while still nestling inside it. 'It was a complete mystery to the adult intelligences, how had he done it, if it was he who had done it, but if not he, who then and why? So the next afternoon they (Mummy and Nanny) planted the pram in the usual spot, and stood over it, watching - the baby lay there smiling or snivelling up at them, until it struck them that they should try observing the baby when unobserved by the baby, and they withdrew behind bushes and trees etc.; and thus witnessed the swaying of the pram, then the juddering of the pram, then its slow, unsteady progress along the path, the movement accompanied by a low humming and keening sound from within that reminded them more of a dog than a human ... "jouncing" was the word they used for it. I was a jouncer therefore.' In the second book of his chronicles of triumph and disaster which started with The Smoking Diaries, Gray intertwined scenes from his adult and his childish self to produce a brilliant and moving counterpoint of life's unsteady progress.

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The final volume of the trilogy that began with The Smoking Diaries finds Simon Gray determined to give up smoking. Really. At last. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters? As this wonderful, wayward record of Gray's life progresses, these questions are overtaken by much larger ones. What was sex like before 1963? Will his name be in lights on Broadway? Why leave the bedside of his dying mother? With their combination of comedy and serious reflection, of sharp observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray's diaries reinvented the memoir form and are destined to become classics of autobiography.

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When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries was the result, in which one of Britain's most beloved and original writers reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.

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'Sharp, funny and clever . . . What a pleasure to re-encounter a play that combines unabashed intelligence and zinging wit with a rare generosity of spirit.'Daily Telegraph on The Common Pursuit'Gray's stature as one of the handful of great tragi-comic English dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century would appear now to be undisputed.' Howard Jacobson, Critical QuarterlyHidden Laughter'A sad divine comedy, superbly written. Gray nurses his characters and cares for them, but he never pampers them, or pities them, or presumes to use them as his spokesman. In this respect, he has become an English Chekhov... At the same time, Gray dispenses some of the incandescent malice and moral savagery of Coward at his acid best... But, of course, comparisons can only help you get your bearings. Gray is entirely his own man in this painful, querulous, warm, hard and mature play.' Sunday Times

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