N.F. Simpson, whose work includes One Way Pendulum, led the twentieth century British Absurdist movement. His first play, A Resounding Tinkle, was one of the winners in the Observer play competition in 1957. The incessant ambush of non-sequiturs , as Kenneth Tynan described it, is a gloriously comic revelation of the absurdity of every day life. A Resounding Tinkle was revived with the sketch Gladly Otherwise at the Donmar Warehouse in July 2007.
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N. F. Simpson was one of the leading exponents of the theatre of the absurd, and is best known for his play A Resounding Tinkle, made famous by its premiere at the Royal Court in 1957, and later to star Peter Cook. But beyond that he was a major force in the satire boom of the sixties, and wrote much exceptional comedy for film and TV for the likes of John Cleese, Beryl Reid, Hattie Jacques and Eric Sykes, as well as a number of brilliantly funny plays for theatre, which starred big names such as Harold Pinter and Kenneth Williams. His influence on everyone from Peter Cook's much-loved character E. L. Wisty to Monty Python's Flying Circus helped spawn a generation of incredible comic talent. Plays included in the collection are A Resounding Tinkle, The Hole, Gladly Otherwise, One Way Pendulum, The Cresta Run, Was He Anyone? and his final work, If So, Then Yes, first performed in 2010. This collection celebrates the work of this lost comic genius, and seeks to put his reputation back at the heart of British - and world - comedy.
In this absurdist comedy two lovers - a playwright and his lead actress - escape to a discreet and charming Parisian hotel, conjured from a desert landscape. As the walls, door and crimson curtains of Room 322 materialise around them, a fumbling of fastenings ensues. But they soon discover they're not the only couple intent on escaping from reality. . . The Crimson Hotel has its world premiere at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, London, on 25 July 2007. The volume also features the one-act play, Audience, a delightful send-up which holds up a mirror to the outlandish behaviour and comedy inherent in every theatre audience.
Stage Right is a refreshingly abrasive account of the state of British theatre since 1979, offering an account of the development of a new mainstream formed in conscious opposition to the work of the politically committed dramatists of the 70s and an analysis of the plays of the most successful playwrights of the new mainstream: Nichols, Gray, Frayn, Bennett, Ayckbourn and Stoppard.
"Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institute for Anglistics/American Studies), course: British Varieties of the Drama of the Absurd: Pinter, Simpson, Saunders, Campton, language: English, abstract: Literary critics have discussed N.F. Simpson’s one-act play A Resounding Tinkle in a controversial manner. A number of them saw it as a representative of the British variety of the “Theatre of the Absurd” (Esslin 1964: passim); others express doubts that there really is a serious philosophical intent and state that Simpson tries to amuse his audience for more superficial reasons (Fothergill 1973: passim). Leaving these questions aside I will focus on the question whether the one-act version of A Resounding Tinkle can or has to be interpreted as socio-cultural criticism. By analysis of the motifs, characters, structure and language I will try to show in how far Simpson makes allusions to suburbia and satirises the middleclass society. The term suburbia is frequently used by various authors. Most educated readers will have a more or less clear idea of the phenomenon it stands for. It is however difficult to find a full, comprehensive and precise definition of the term in literature. For my analysis it is nevertheless indispensable to define the term suburbia before analysing and interpreting the play. Due to the lack of literature about this topic I have to rely on my own experience with and knowledge about suburbia. Additionally I base my definition on the thorough research work of David Thorns from whose book Suburbia (1972) I give a number of quotations. It is difficult to give a date for the beginning of suburbanisation, but the phenomenon is known since after the Second World War. Urbanisation, having reached a practical point of saturation, lead to suburbanisation, the desire to live in neighbourhoods with green spaces. (During the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries people had started to move from the country into the cities, which therefore grew at an enormous speed. The quality of life began to decrease in the overcrowded cities. Poverty and lack of space for the individual made living in the cities more strenuous.) [...]
In the first volume of his memoirs, As Far As I Remember, Michael Bawtree told the story of his youthful years, from his birth in Australia to growing up in England during and after World War II, with an education at Radley College and Worcester College, Oxford and a two-year stint in the British Army. In this second volume he recounts his experience as a raw new immigrant in Canada, and his first steps as a professional actor, a university instructor, a book critic, dramaturge and playwright. In the years that followed he made a name for himself at the newly-founded Simon Fraser University, where he initiated the theatre program, and at the Stratford Festival, where he eventually served as Associate Director and director of the Third Stage, before leaving to freelance as a theatre director both in Canada and the USA. In 1975 he founded COMUS Music Theatre with Maureen Forrester, and went on to establish himself as a pioneer in Canadian music theatre development. The volume finishes in 1977 as he is on his way for the first time to the Banff Centre, where he was to play a major role in the following ten years. Michael's story, elegantly and amusingly written, gives us a vivid picture of Canada's theatre activity in the sixties and seventies, with honest though not always flattering portraits of some of its most distinguished artists. He is also open and honest about himself, recounting his failures and well as his successes, and sharing with us what became the love of his life.ÿ
