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Comedy. Harold Brighouse Harold Brighouse manages to extract the maximum of comedy from a
farcical situation. Zack is the half-witted son of a wedding purveyor
whose cheerfulness and goodheartedness are a greater asset than his
brother's crafty greed, and the story shows in most amusing fashion
how he eventually wins self-respect and a bride. Period 1920s Play. Harry Kondoleon. As the play begins a young man, Himmer, is trying to console his
father on the death of his long estranged wife (and Himmer's mother)
whom neither has seen for many years, but the older man, Jacob, is
apparently more interested in his model trains. Himmer then conceives
the idea of honouring his mother's memory by staging a verse play, "The
Ruins of Athens," which she had written in her youth, but, in the
meantime,- his friend Samantha, a compulsive lover of married men,
arrives to inform him that both she and he have tested seropositive
to the HIV test - which means that both are harbouring the AIDS virus,
if not actually stricken with the disease. To Himmer, once married
but now a declared homosexual, this constitutes yet another instance
of the futility, the purposelessness, the random cruelty of modern
life, but he forges ahead nevertheless, abetted by his friend Prentice
(who is recovering from the breakup of a long-standing gay relationship);
an actor, Patrick (who is suicidally despairing about the status
of his career); and Debbie (an eccentric young heiress with a penchant
for older men who is smitten by Himmer's poet-father). Eventually
Himmer and the others do indeed perform the play, albeit at an AIDS
research center to which they have retreated and where, with a customary
mixture of angst and dismay, Himmer decides, to substitute real poison
for the hemlock called for in the final scene of his mother's epic
- thereby providing, for those who wish it, an easy means of exit
from a world which seems to make little sense in the first place. Play. Peter Terson Specially written for the National Youth Theatre the play depicts with enormous vigour the story of Harry, a 'football hooligan' and his progress forwards from the end of his schooldays. Football is in fact only the background to the author's real concern, which is the emptiness and futility facing so many youngsters today when they leave secondary school at fifteen, only to find themselves in a series of dead-end jobs. The play may indeed be called an important social document but its essential appeal lies in its exhilarating theatrical life. |