Picture of author.

Christopher Fry (1907–2005)

Autor(a) de The Lady's Not for Burning

59+ Works 1,304 Membros 17 Críticas 4 Favorited

About the Author

Success came to Christopher Fry after 38 years of living close to poverty. He was born in Bristol, where his father, a poor architect, turned to lay missionary work in the slums. In 1940, after alternating between teaching and acting, Fry became the director of the excellent Oxford Playhouse. As a mostrar mais Quaker conscientious objector, he refused to bear arms in World War II. He was first discovered by critics and connoisseurs in 1946, when a small London theater staged A Phoenix Too Frequent, his version of the perennial story of the widow who accepts a new lover while mourning beside her husband's grave. Three years later, John Gielgud's production of The Lady's Not for Burning (1949) brought Fry popular success in London and the provinces. This clever medieval conceit was produced in New York, and received the Drama Critics Circle Award for 1950. Sir Laurence Olivier commissioned Venus Observed (1950), a play about middle age, the autumn section of what has come to be a cycle of seasonal plays. The winter play, The Dark Is Light Enough (1954), followed two years later. Set in 1848, during the Hungarian revolution against the Austrian empire, it takes a moral stand against any use of violence. (An antiwar morality play, A Sleep of Prisoners, had been produced in 1951.) It was more than a decade before Fry's summer comedy, A Yard of Sun (1970), was published. Fry's relation to T. S. Eliot is interesting. Like him, Fry is a Christian verse dramatist. He has set a play (like Eliot) in a church (A Sleep of Prisoners); he has written a historical study of Becket and Henry II (Curtmantle, 1962). And, like Eliot, Fry has achieved a loose, speakable verse. Yet their differences are equally instructive. Fry's verse, unlike Eliot's functional amble, strives to be poetic, with flamboyant energy and arresting wit. The same theatricality is evident in, say, his Becket play, in which he replaces the introspection of Eliot's martyr with the strong clash of personalities. The Lady's Not for Burning ---which was performed alongside Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949) in 1949---is a downright, if intellectual, comedy, unlike the dry drawing-room enigma of Eliot. As a translator-adaptor, Fry seems almost single-handedly responsible for the postwar English vogue of modern French writers. His version of Jean Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (a transatlantic success in 1959, when it was retitled Tiger at the Gates) was revived at the National Theatre in 1984, directed by Harold Pinter. Fry is also a screenwriter (John Huston's The Bible, William Wyler's Ben Hur) and composer. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos

Séries

Obras por Christopher Fry

The Lady's Not for Burning (1948) 453 exemplares
A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) 87 exemplares
Venus Observed (1949) 83 exemplares
The Bible: In the Beginning [1966 film] (1992) — Screenwriter — 82 exemplares
A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) 81 exemplares
The Dark is Light Enough (1954) 76 exemplares
Barabbas [1961 film] (1961) — Screenwriter — 58 exemplares
The Firstborn (1946) 41 exemplares
The Boy with a Cart (1945) 36 exemplares
Curtmantle (1961) 33 exemplares
Thor, With Angels (1948) 33 exemplares
Selected Plays (1951) 28 exemplares
A Yard of Sun (1970) 14 exemplares
An Experience of Critics (1952) 11 exemplares
The Bible: Original Screenplay (1966) 7 exemplares
A Queen Is Crowned [1953 film] (1953) — Autor — 7 exemplares
The Boat That Mooed 4 exemplares
Djomi Dream Child (2004) 3 exemplares
The Lady's Not Burning (1950) 3 exemplares
Death is a kind of love (1979) 2 exemplares
Tiger at the Gates 1 exemplar
The Early Days (1997) 1 exemplar
There Plays 1 exemplar
Occasionally 1 exemplar
Open door (1935) 1 exemplar
Plays (1950) 1 exemplar
CHRISTOPHER FRY PLAYS (1970) 1 exemplar
One Thing More (1987) 1 exemplar

Associated Works

Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) — Tradutor, algumas edições7,363 exemplares
Tiger at the Gates (1935) — Tradutor, algumas edições614 exemplares
The Lark (1952) — Tradutor, algumas edições361 exemplares
The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950) — Contribuidor, algumas edições264 exemplares
Ring Round the Moon (1948) — Tradutor, algumas edições115 exemplares
Religious Drama 1 (1957) — Contribuidor — 72 exemplares
Three European Plays (1958) — Tradutor — 59 exemplares
Four Modern Verse Plays (1957) — Contribuidor — 54 exemplares
Contemporary Drama - 11 Plays (1956) — Contribuidor — 46 exemplares
The West Country Book (1981) — Contribuidor — 6 exemplares
Laurie Lee: A Many-coated Man (1998) — Contribuidor — 5 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1907-12-18
Data de falecimento
2005-06-30
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de falecimento
Bristol, UK
Locais de residência
Chichester, UK

Membros

Críticas

Still my favorite play ever read, ever. I like to just roll around in the words and let them wash over me.
 
Assinalado
tanaise | 6 outras críticas | Jul 17, 2022 |
Le più grandi storie dell'Antico Testamento e i primi ventidue capitoli della Genesi. (fonte: ibs)
 
Assinalado
MemorialeSardoShoah | 2 outras críticas | Mar 14, 2020 |
Comedy written in the early 20th century but set in the early 15th. This leads to a few anachronisms, some references to information that would not have been known yet in the time of the play, but these are few, and probably would not be noticed by anyone who hasn't studied the history of science (or the history of religion - there are a couple of anachronisms there, as well). The work is a satirical take on witch hunts and the witch hunters, but more especially the bureaucrats who feathered their nests with the property of the condemned witches. The plot is simple: a man shows up at the home of the mayor demanding to be hanged, confessing to murders no one can verify have occurred. A mob is on a witch hunt for a young woman, claiming she has turned one of the purported murder victims into a dog. The man is poor. The woman is rich. The mayor maneuvers to try to get the man to admit he is innocent while getting the woman to admit her guilt. There are several twists and turns, love triangles, and philosophical musings, and the play ends in a not totally satisfying manner, either for those who like happy endings or those who find them facile. Overall, an interesting work that has enough strange goings ons to satisfy a demanding audience and one that can give pleasure in the reading.… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
Devil_llama | 6 outras críticas | Feb 17, 2018 |
This is a relatively short one-act play written to be performed in a church (the first performance was in St. Mary's Church, Oxford).

The topic of the play is an initial struggle and then a succession of dreams by four English soldiers, prisoners of war, in a church which has been turned into a prison camp. Like Fry's other plays, it takes an essentially positive view of the possibilities of human nature, and for all its classification as a "religious" play it is more focussed on the capacities of the human spirit than on divine action.

The dreams present different perspectives shed on an essentially static set of figures chosen by Fry as types -- a man of action but little reflection (David); a man of reflection with little aptitude for action or "normal" interactions (Peter) (he's not obviously Autism spectrum but he could be played that way); a practical figure whose authority comes from his position (Corporal Joseph Adams); and an older man who has inherent authority as a result of experience and temperament (Tim Meadows). After an initial altercation in which the first attacks the second in a burst of temper, they dream of (in order the dreams appear): the Cain and Abel story; David and Absalom; Abraham and Isaac; and the three young men in the fiery furnace. In each dream the dreamer takes one role and projects other roles onto the others; in the last dream they seem to share some component of the dreaming.

The play is not quite static: there are little pivot points of perception during the last dream by Peter ("we can only stay and alter") and David ('to be strong beyond all action is the strength to have") which move them into at least the possibility of some different capacities. Whether the exposition by Meadows in that scene can be seen as transformative or merely expository is left ambiguous, especially as the characters show no clear sign of remembering their dreams.

The war in question has been "generalized", as Fry is more interested in war as a metaphor for living than as a literal thing. The original occurrence which inspired the play was during the English Civil War, and it's worth noting that at no time does Fry use anything to identify the enemy other than "towzers", a term which has a principal reference to a fictional dog in "Towzer's Advice to the Scriblers", a tract from 1681 and the Popish Plot. They speak some other language, unspecified, but not only have provided an English Bible but an English hymn book with a hymn by Mrs Alexander (i.e. of English origin) in it.

This is one of Fry's stronger plays, for all its short length.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
jsburbidge | Mar 14, 2016 |

Listas

Prémios

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
59
Also by
13
Membros
1,304
Popularidade
#19,682
Avaliação
4.1
Críticas
17
ISBN
73
Línguas
3
Marcado como favorito
4

Tabelas & Gráficos