There's a moment in Michael Frayn's Afterlife, when, moments before the opening of his new play, an anxious Max Reinhardt grips the hands of his actress mistress and exclaims, "Why do we put ourselves through it?!"
Well, if Frayn himself shares similar nerves he hides them well. He was sat a couple of rows behind me at the Lyttelton tonight and looked as calm as anything. Perhaps he was saving his sweaty palms for press night tomorrow.
The play, a superior theatrical biopic, has all the craft you'd expect from Frayn but didn't seem to take the audience with it in quite the way you might hope.
I pretty much agree with John Morrison's assessment on his blog.
"Telling a life on stage means chucking out the unities of time and place and plot in favour of a structure which is more narrative than drama. Some people like nothing better than episodic novels and biographies turned into stage plays, but for me they never really work. The minor characters tend to buzz in and out like flies and too much hangs on the central protagonist, who often seems to have little inner life. The relationships that develop are too fleeting and one rarely gets the sense of a single dramatic choice or decisive moment that provides a hinge for the play."
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