Download or read book Frayn Plays 4 written by Michael Frayn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Frayn is one of the great playwrights of our time, enjoying international acclaim and prestige. This anthology contains three of his strongest titles of serious drama: Copenhagen, Democracy and Afterlife. The volume features the definitive version of each play together with an introduction by the author and a chronology of his work. Copenhagen: 'The most invigorating and ingenious play of ideas in many a year and a work of art that humanizes physics in a way no other has done' New York Times 'Michael Frayn's tremendous new play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session.' Sunday Times 'A profound and haunting meditation on the mysteries of human motivation.' Independent Democracy: 'Michael Frayn's complex and richly rewarding new play...is wonderfully alert to the piquant paradoxes and ironic twists of this intensely tricky period in Germany's conversation with itself.' Independent 'What makes Frayn's play essential viewing is its Schiller-like grasp of practical politics' Guardian 'Michael Frayn's Democracy...is one of those rare dramas that don't just dare to think big but that fully translate their high aspirations to the stage, with sharp style and thrilling clarity' New York Times Afterlife: 'This play is almost literally brilliant - it glitters, shines and gleams with Frayn's trademark perceptive wit as it sends up the whole concept of theatre in the process of telling a strong, essentially tragic biographical story' The Stage

Download or read book Matchbox Theatre written by Michael Frayn and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matchbox Theatre presents a sketch show in miniature: thirty short entertainments by Michael Frayn, author of Skios and Noises Off, 'the funniest farce ever written' (New York Times). Thirty snatches of people talking. To each other, to the world at large, to themselves, to no one. Heard, unheard. Overheard, half-heard. On telephones, into microphones. In a crypt, an airport, an orchestra pit. These tiny plays are offered here for performance in the smallest theatre in the world: the theatre of your own imagination. The scripts are provided. Everything else - casting, set design, ice cream sales - is up to you . . . 'Michael Frayn is the most philosophical comic writer - and the most comic philosophical writer - of our time.' Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

Download or read book Noises Off written by Michael Frayn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As finely worked as a Swiss watch and as funny as the human condition permits ... the zigzag brilliance of the text as the clunky lines of the farce-within-a-farce rub against the sharp dialogue of reality.” The Guardian A play-within-a-play following a touring theatre company who are rehearsing and performing a comedy called Nothing On, results in a riotous double-bill of comedic craft and dramatic skill. Hurtling along at breakneck speed it shows the backstage antics as they stumble through the dress-rehearsal at Weston-super-Mare, then on to a disastrous matinee at Ashton-under-Lyne, followed by a total meltdown in Stockton-on-Tees. Michael Frayn's irresistible, multi-award-winning backstage farce has been enjoyed by millions of people worldwide since it premiered in 1982 and has been hailed as one of the greatest British comedies ever written. Winner of both Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Comedy. This edition features a new introduction by Michael Blakemore.

Download or read book Copenhagen written by Michael Frayn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2000 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.

Download or read book Alphabetical Order written by Michael Frayn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award after its long run at the Hampstead Theatre and on the West End in 1975, Alphabetical Order is set in the library of a provincial newspaper where battle is joined between the forces of order and chaos, between arid organisation in the person of the new library assistant, Leslie, and humane confusion in the person of Lucy, the much-loved resident librarian. Drawing on his experience as a journalist, Frayn draws his gallery of characters with the hilarious accuracy which can only come from first-hand experience. This edition features the author's revised version of the script presented at the Hampstead Theatre in April 2009.

Download or read book Democracy written by Michael Frayn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant exploration of character and conscience from the author of COPENHAGEN, set amid the tensions of 1960s Berlin In Democracy, Michael Frayn once again creates out of the known events of twentieth-century history a drama of extraordinary urgency and subtlety, reimagining the interactions and motivations of Willy Brandt as he became chancellor of West Germany in 1966 and those of his political circle, including Günter Guillaume, a functionary who became Brandt's personal assistant-and who was eventually exposed as an East German spy in a discovery that helped force Brandt from office. But what circumstances allowed Brandt to become the first left-wing chancellor in forty years? And why, given his progressive policies, did the East German secret police feel it necessary to plant a spy in his office and risk bringing down his government? Michael Frayn writes in his postscript to the play, "Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions."

Download or read book Stage Directions written by Michael Frayn and published by Faber & Faber Plays. This book was released on 2008 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This autobiography covers half a lifetime & the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a piece about his latest play, 'Afterlife'. It is also a reflection on his path into theatre - the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man &, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion.

Download or read book A Landing on the Sun written by Michael Frayn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World) For fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors. So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives in the Cabinet Office Registry, Jessel begins to reconstruct Summerchild's last months. It begins to emerge that, at a time when America had just put men on the moon, the British were involved in an even bolder project, and that Summerchild was investigating a phenomenon as common as sunlight, but as powerful and dangerous as any of the forces that modern science has known. The secret world into which Brian Jessel stumbles turns out to be even more extraordinary than his department had feared.

Download or read book Spies written by Michael Frayn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect that all is not what it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for. 'Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success ... Frayn's novel excels.' John updike, New Yorker 'A beautifully accomplished, richly nostalgic novel about supposed second-world-war espionage seen through the eyes of a young boy.' Sunday Times 'Deeply satisfying . . . Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent

Download or read book Headlong written by Michael Frayn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic Martin Clay is asked by a boorish country squire to assess his paintings. Clay spots what he suspects is a Bruegel and so begins a tale of lies and concealment as he schemes to separate the painting from its owner.

Download or read book Alphabetical Order and Donkeys Years written by Michael Frayn and published by London : Eyre Methuen. This book was released on 1977 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Magic Mobile written by Michael Frayn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mobile phone is something that gives you the whole world at the touch of your finger - but this book is even better. Magic Mobile is a collection of thirty 'pre-loaded' new text files in a no-fuss, non-digital entertainment system. In a volume that succeeds Matchbox Theatre and Pocket Playhouse, each of these short comic masterpieces displays Michael Frayn's unique genius in forever capturing life's latest absurdities. Tune in to the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Magic Mobile 13 May, 20 May, 27 May, 3 June. Michael Frayn's eleven novels include Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies and Skios. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen.

Download or read book The Human Touch written by Michael Frayn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls "the oldest mystery": the world is what we make of it.

Download or read book Here written by Michael Frayn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1994 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two people move into an empty room and begin to construct a life together in this work by the author of Noises Off, Copenhagen, Benefactors and numerous other well known plays. Should the bed go here and the table go there? Or the bed there and the table here? Everything inside this small space is for them to decide. The responsibility is daunting - especially when they reflect that it has taken the whole history of the world to get them together in this particular place at this particular time and that the whole future of the world will be different if the table is here instead of there. But how can they decide anything when the other person keeps disagreeing and when the woman downstairs maddeningly dumps unwanted furniture on them that they do not have the heart to refuse?

Download or read book Wild Honey written by Anton Chekhov and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oh, Misha, it's terrible to be an educated woman. An educated woman with nothing to do. What am I here for? Why am I alive? They should make me a professor somewhere, or a director of something ... If I were a diplomat I'd turn the whole world upside down ... An educated woman ... And nothing to do. Village schoolmaster Mikhail Vasilyevich has it all: wit, intelligence, a comfortable and respectable life in provincial Russia, and the attentions of four beautiful women - one of whom is his devoted wife... As summer arrives and the seasonal festivities commence, the rapidly intensifying heat makes everyone giddy with sunlight, vodka – and passion. Michael Frayn's comedy of errors, drawn from Chekhov's untitled and posthumously discovered early play, is a tale of nineteenth-century Russian life replete with classic misunderstandings, irrepressible desires and nostalgia for a vanishing world. Wild Honey received its premiere in the National Theatre's Lyttelton space, London, on 19 July 1984. This edition was published for the revival at the Hampstead Theatre in December 2016.

Download or read book Deceptions written by Rebecca Frayn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HOW WELL CAN A MOTHER EVER REALLY KNOW HER CHILD? Julian and Annie have only just announced their forthcoming marriage when Annie’s twelve-year-old son, Dan, fails to come home from school. Despite an extensive police investigation, the days turn into weeks and it is as if Dan has vanished into thin air. Over the next three years Annie refuses to give up hope that somewhere her son is alive and will one day return home. Julian, meanwhile, can’t help but yearn for Annie to put the past behind her and move on. Then, out of the blue, a call brings shocking news of Dan’s fate. And far from being over, it seems the mystery of his disappearance is only just beginning. In spare, searing prose, Deceptions addresses our simultaneous need for—and wariness of—human connection and the extremes that we are driven to by these competing impulses. Marking British literary star Rebecca Frayn’s arrival in the United States, this is fiction at its riveting best.

Download or read book Copenhagen written by Michael Frayn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster. Why the German physicist Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in 1941 and what he wanted to say to the Danish physicist Bohr are questions which have exercised historians of nuclear physics ever since. In Michael Frayn's new play Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers, and to work out, just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom, how we can ever know why we do what we do. 'Michael Frayn's tremendous play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session.' Sunday Times