| SIMON GRAY
MEMOIRS Visit the official Simon Gray website here |
||
| YEAR |
TITLE |
|
| 1985 |
 |
AN UNNATURAL
PURSUIT AND OTHER PIECES: In the first
half of 1984, Simon Gray kept a diary during the
staging of his recent play, The Common Pursuit.
This record of the production at the Lyric
Theatre, Hammersmith, is self-analytical, witty,
painful, and wonderfully observed. An Unnatural
Pursuit is the story in microcosm of
all productions, successful and unsuccessful. It
also tells us about Simon Gray, about his
working relationship with Harold Pinter - who
has directed many of his plays - and above all
about the immensely complicated but fascinating
business of putting on a play. It is a fine and
memorable addition to the distinguished
literature of the theatre. 'Rueful, funny and
rewarding.' Times
Literary Supplement. 'A wonderful
production diary of a tortured, paranoid
playwright. Gray is a writer of mordant wit and
considerable elegance.' Financial Times. O-R88
RR90 RR92 RR |
| 1988 |  |
HOW'S THAT FOR
TELLING 'EM FAT LADY?: Simon
Gray's works for the stage include Butley,
Otherwise Engaged, Quartermaine's Terms
and Melon.
He has also described the life of the
playwright in An Unnatural Pursuit, a
coruscatingly witty account, day by day, of
the experiences of having his play, The Common
Pursuit, staged in London under the direction
of Harold Pinter. Now, in How's That for
Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? he continues
his adventures with the same play - in the
United States of America. In a series of
sharp, hilarious snapshots, Simon Gray shows
the production beginning its American life in
Los Angeles, and finally triumphant, reaching
the off-Broadway stage where it is still
enjoying a successful run. O-R88
RR90 RR08
Read a review of How's That for Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? |
| 1995 |  |
FAT CHANCE -
'STEPHEN FRY QUITS' DRAMA: In early
1995, the 'Stephen Fry quits' drama spawned
dozens of newspaper articles on the runaway
actor. After receiving generally good reviews,
Simon Gray's Cell Mates mysteriously
metamorphosed into a 'bad' play and one from
which the overworked Fry had been right to
walk away. The media continued to be
fascinated: the plucky understudy, the
dependable Simon Ward, the angry playwright,
the righteous self-justification of the
critics and more and more on Stephen Fry. Yet
Rik Mayall, the other star of the play, and a
continuing strong presence on stage, was
noticeably absent from the welter of words.
Betrayal is in the air but what really
happened and why? Fat Chance, Simon Gray's
compulsively readable account of life on the
edge of a nervous breakdown, charts the real
drama behind the media drama behind the stage
drama.
O-R95 RR97 RR
|
| 2001 |  |
ENTER A FOX - FURTHER ADVENTURES OF A PARANOID: How much can go wrong in a day? How much can go wrong in a life? In this chronicle of a year of things going wrong (and just occasionally right), the author meets with triumph and disaster and treats those two impostors just the same - which is to say with the mixture of wit, anger, vexation and candour that has made Simon Gray one of Britain's greatest writers of comedy - including the comedy that lurks in tragedy. His play The Late Middle Classes finally received its West End premiere in 2010 at the Donmar Warehouse in London. In its first appearance at Watford in 1999 it won Best New Play, but its West End transfer at the Gielgud theatre was dropped to make room for a musical about a boy band (which flopped). Harold Pinter called that "an act of betrayal and disgrace to English theatre" and for once he wasn’t putting it too strongly. Gray's experience of that original production is the subject of his diary Enter a Fox. O-R01 RR |
| 2004 |  |
THE SMOKING
DIARIES: 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 is the result a book in which
one of Britain's most amusing and original
writers reflects on a life filled with
cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped),
several triumphs and many more disasters; a
record of shame, adultery friendship and love.
Few diarists have been so frank about
themselves, and even fewer so entertaining.
O-R04 |
| 2006 |  |
THE YEAR OF THE
JOUNCER: 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 these,
the latest chronicles of triumph and disaster
from the celebrated author of The Smoking
Diaries, Gray intertwines scenes from
his adult and his childish self to produce a
brilliant and moving counterpoint of life's
unsteady progress. O-R09 |
| 2008 |  |
THE LAST CIGARETTE:
Simon Gray is determined to give up smoking. Can
he kick the habit of sixty years? As this
wonderful record of Gray's life progresses, the
question dwindles in the shadow of much larger
ones. Will his name be in lights on Broadway?
What was sex like before 1963? Why did he leave
the bedside of his dying mother? Meanwhile, what
is that lady doing with her nose on the plane to
Athens? In their combination of comedy and
serious reflection, of sharp observation and
painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray's diaries
have reinvented the memoir form and are destined
to become classics of autobiography. The beauty
of them lies in their struggle to put a finger
on some kind of personal truth. The Last Cigarette
takes us to many places – Suffolk, a Greek
island, the Caribbean, New York - but not least
to a man's heart. O-R08 Read about the stage production The Last Cigarette |
| 2008 |  |
CODA: During a
holiday with his wife in Crete, the celebrated
diarist and playwright Simon Gray recalls the
scans and consultations that have dominated the
previous months in this frank, moving and often
painfully funny account of what he refers to as
'the beginning of my dying'. Wonderfully comic
depictions of the medical team are interrupted
by unforgettable portraits of fellow tourists,
digressions on everything from crimes of passion
to a brief history of his athletic career, and a
masterfully tense distraction, composed while
waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking
one last cigarette. Written with a great
generosity of spirit and a poignant reluctance
to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's Coda is as
life-affirming as it is heart-rending. O-R09 Read Simon Gray obituaries |
| Go to Home Page
Authors Menu Email-me@chaseside.org.uk |
||