The Two of Us (play)
Encyclopedia
The Two of Us is a 1970 play by British
playwright
Michael Frayn
. It consists of four one-act plays for two actors and is Frayn's first published play.
It was first performed at the Garrick Theatre
by Richard Briers
and Lynn Redgrave
.
The four plays that make up The Two of Us are:
Lynn Redgrave and John Clark
later optioned The Two of Us for a successful 1975 coast to coast United States tour. Unable to find one actor willing and able to play all the male parts, director Clark settled for 3 actors. For The New Quixote he had cast a black actor to increase the woman's dilemma, but when the play reached Elitch Gardens
in Denver, the theatre producer refused to let the play go on unless the part was recast with a white actor. The same refusal was repeated throughout the tour, a sign of those times.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn
Michael J. Frayn is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy...
. It consists of four one-act plays for two actors and is Frayn's first published play.
It was first performed at the Garrick Theatre
Garrick Theatre
The Garrick Theatre is a West End theatre, located on Charing Cross Road, in the City of Westminster. It opened on 24 April 1889 with The Profligate, a play by Arthur Wing Pinero. In its early years, it appears to have specialised in the performance of melodrama, and today the theatre is a...
by Richard Briers
Richard Briers
Richard David Briers, CBE is an English actor whose career has encompassed theatre, television, film and radio.He first came to prominence as George Starling in Marriage Lines in the 1960s, but it was in the following decade when he played Tom Good in the BBC sitcom The Good Life that he became a...
and Lynn Redgrave
Lynn Redgrave
Lynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE was an English actress.A member of the well-known British family of actors, Redgrave trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962...
.
The four plays that make up The Two of Us are:
- Black and Silver: A night in the life of a young married couple on holiday with a new baby. This was originally written for a season of one-act plays by various authors, for which it was not accepted; Frayn then wrote the remaining plays in order to create his own season of one-act plays. They were
- The New Quixote: An eccentric young man pursues a relationship with an older woman who met him at a party where she got inebriated. When she finds him at her door the next morning she wants nothing more of him.
- Mr Foot: An Englishman seems to have formed a better relationship with his twitching foot than with his somewhat envious wife.
- Chinamen: A farceFarceIn theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...
about a catastrophic dinner party, in which the two actors play all of the characters. (The host of the party remarks, early in the piece, that he has trouble telling his typical English friends apart, comparing them to the proverbial Chinamen that all supposedly look alike.) The play is a tour-de-force, with the two actors changing costumes and assuming new roles without apparent effort. Frayn considered the frantic backstage activity funnier than the play itself, which inspired his very successful play Noises OffNoises OffNoises Off is a 1982 play by English playwright Michael Frayn. The idea for it was born in 1970, when Frayn was standing in the wings watching a performance of Chinamen, a farce that he had written for Lynn Redgrave...
.
Lynn Redgrave and John Clark
John Clark (actor/director)
Ivan John Clark is an English actor, director, producer, and writer with British, American and Canadian citizenship. He is also known as the ex-husband of actress Lynn Redgrave, to whom he was married for 33 years.-Early career:...
later optioned The Two of Us for a successful 1975 coast to coast United States tour. Unable to find one actor willing and able to play all the male parts, director Clark settled for 3 actors. For The New Quixote he had cast a black actor to increase the woman's dilemma, but when the play reached Elitch Gardens
Elitch Gardens
Elitch Gardens was a family-owned seasonal amusement park, theater, and botanic garden in the West Highland neighborhood of Denver, Colorado, United States at 38th and Tennyson streets. For more than a century Elitch's was one of the most popular entertainment destinations in Colorado...
in Denver, the theatre producer refused to let the play go on unless the part was recast with a white actor. The same refusal was repeated throughout the tour, a sign of those times.
External links
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/booker/Story/0,,201703,00.html
- http://doollee.com/PlaywrightsF/frayn-michael.html
- http://www.kakiseni.com/events/theatre/ODU3MQ.html
- http://www.nytheatre-wire.com/frayn.htm