Butley (play)

Last updated • 3 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Butley
Butley (play).jpg
Poster of original West End production
Written by Simon Gray
Date premiered14 July 1971
Place premiered Criterion Theatre, London
Original languageEnglish
GenreDrama
SettingAn office in a London university
Official site

Butley is a play by Simon Gray set in the office of an English lecturer at a university in London, England. [1] The title character, a T. S. Eliot scholar, is an alcoholic who loses his wife and his close friend and colleague and possibly male lover on the same day. [2] The action of the dark comedy takes place over several hours on the same day during which he bullies students, friends and colleagues while falling apart at the seams. [3] The play won the 1971 Evening Standard Award for Best Play. [4]

Contents

Characters

Productions

Butley was first performed at the Criterion Theatre in London on 14 July 1971, produced by Michael Codron and directed by Harold Pinter, with the following cast: [5]

Alan Bates won the 1971 Evening Standard Award for Best Actor for his performance. [4] The role of Butley was subsequently taken on by Alec McCowen and Richard Briers in the same production. [6] Bates reprised his performance the following year in a Broadway production directed by James Hammerstein, set design Eileen Diss, lighting and set design Neil Peter Jampolis, at the Morosco Theatre, where it ran for 14 previews and 135 performances. [7] The show cast Hayward Morse (Joseph Keyston), Geraldine Sherman (Miss Heasman), Barbara Lester (Edna Shaft), Holland Taylor (Anne Butley), Roger Newman (Reg Nuttall), and Christopher Hastings (Mr Gardner). Bates won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance, and Gray was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play . [8]

A successful 2006 limited-run Broadway revival at the Booth Theatre was directed by Nicholas Martin. [3] It starred Nathan Lane and Dana Ivey, who was nominated for the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play. [9]

A 2011 London West End production of the play was produced for the Duchess Theatre, directed by Lindsay Posner with a cast including Dominic West, Paul McGann, Penny Downie, Amanda Drew, and Emma Hiddleston. [10] The production started at the Brighton Festival from 25 May 2011 and in the West End from 1 June 2011. [11]

In his introduction to the play, Harold Pinter wrote:

Simon Gray asked me to direct Butley in 1970. I found its savage, lacerating wit hard to beat and accepted the invitation... The extraordinary thing about Butley, it still seems to me, is that the play gives us a character who hurls himself towards the destruction while living, in the fever of his intellectual hell, with a vitality and brilliance known to few of us. He courts death by remaining ruthlessly  even dementedly  alive. It's a remarkable creation and Alan Bates as Butley gave the performance of a lifetime. [1]

1974 film

A 1974 film adaptation Butley directed by Pinter starred Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy, Richard O'Callaghan, Susan Engel, and Michael Byrne. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Pinter</span> English playwright (1930–2008)

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivien Merchant</span> English actress (1929–1982)

Ada Brand Thomson, known professionally as Vivien Merchant, was an English actress. She began her career in 1942, and became known for dramatic roles on stage and in films. In 1956 she married the playwright Harold Pinter and performed in many of his plays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Bates</span> English actor (1934-2003)

Sir Alan Arthur Bates was an English actor who came to prominence in the 1960s, when he appeared in films ranging from the popular children's story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving.

<i>The Browning Version</i> (play) Terence Rattigan play from 1948

The Browning Version is a play by Terence Rattigan, seen by many as his best work, and first performed on 8 September 1948 at the Phoenix Theatre, London. It was originally one of two short plays, jointly titled "Playbill"; the companion piece being Harlequinade, which forms the second half of the evening. The Browning Version is set in a boys' public school and the Classics teacher in the play, Crocker-Harris, is believed to have been based on Rattigan's Classics tutor at Harrow School, J. W. Coke Norris (1874–1961).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Gray</span> British writer and academic

Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.

The Evening Standard Theatre Awards, established in 1955, are the oldest theatrical awards ceremony in the United Kingdom. They are presented annually for outstanding achievements in London Theatre, and are organised by the Evening Standard newspaper. They are the West End's equivalent to Broadway's Drama Desk Awards.

<i>Betrayal</i> (play) 1978 play by Harold Pinter

Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-) deceptions.

The Hothouse (1958/1980) is a full-length tragicomedy written by Harold Pinter in the winter of 1958 between The Birthday Party (1957) and The Caretaker (1959). After writing The Hothouse in the winter of 1958 and following the initial commercial failure of The Birthday Party, Pinter put the play aside; in 1979 he re-read it and directed its first production, at Hampstead Theatre, where it opened on 24 April 1980, transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 June 1980, and it was first published, also in 1980, by Eyre Methuen. The play received its American premiere at the Trinity Repertory Company in 1982. Pinter himself played Roote in a subsequent production staged at the Minerva Theatre, in Chichester, in 1995, later transferring to the Comedy Theatre, in London.

Lynne Meadow is an American theatre producer, director and a teacher. She has been the artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club since 1972.

<i>Wise Child</i> Play by Simon Gray

Wise Child is a 1967 play by English playwright Simon Gray.

<i>Otherwise Engaged</i> Comic play by Simon Gray

Otherwise Engaged is a bleakly comic play by English playwright Simon Gray. The play previewed at the Oxford Playhouse and the Richmond Theatre, and then opened at the Queen's Theatre in London on 10 July 1975, with Alan Bates as the star and Harold Pinter as director, produced by Michael Codron. Ian Charleson co-starred as Dave, a Glasgow lout. Michael Gambon took over from Bates in 1976, "playing it for a year, eight times a week." The play also had a successful run on Broadway, opening in February 1977 with Tom Courtenay as Simon and Carolyn Lagerfelt as Beth. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.

Lia Williams is an English actress and director, both on stage, in film and television. Her roles have included playing Wallis Simpson in The Crown, May 33rd for which she was nominated for a BAFTA, The Missing (2016), Kiri (2016), His Dark Materials (2019-2022), and The Capture (2019-present).

David Jonathan Pittu is an American actor, writer and director.

Butley is a 1974 American-British drama film directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy, Richard O'Callaghan, Susan Engel, and Michael Byrne. It is an adaptation from Simon Gray's 1971 play of same name. It was produced by Ely Landau and released through Landau's American Film Theatre.

<i>The Old Masters</i> (play)

The Old Masters is a play by Simon Gray about the art critic Bernard Berenson and the art dealer Joseph Duveen. It is set over one evening in Berenson's Italian home, Villa I Tatti, near Florence, in 1937.

Jamie Lloyd is a British director, best known for his work with his eponymous theatre company. He is known for his modern minimalism and expressionist directorial style. He is a proponent of affordable theatre for young and diverse audiences, and has been praised as "redefining West End theatre". The Daily Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish wrote of Lloyd, "Few directors have Lloyd’s ability to transport us to the upper echelons of theatrical pleasure."

<i>The Common Pursuit</i>

The Common Pursuit is a play by Simon Gray which follows the lives of six characters who first meet as undergraduates at Cambridge University when they are involved in setting up a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit. The title is an allusion to F. R. Leavis's 1952 collection of essays Scrutiny: The Common Pursuit.

<i>Epitaph for George Dillon</i>

Epitaph for George Dillon is an early John Osborne play, one of two he wrote in collaboration with Anthony Creighton. It was written before Look Back in Anger, the play which made Osborne's career, but opened a year after at Oxford Experimental Theatre in 1957, and was then produced at London's Royal Court theatre, where Look Back in Anger had debuted. It transferred to New York City shortly afterwards and garnered three Tony Award nominations.

Sir Michael Victor Codron is a British theatre producer, known for his productions of the early work of Harold Pinter, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard. He has been honoured with a Laurence Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, and is a stakeholder and director of the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, London.

Donald McWhinnie was a BBC executive and later a radio, television, and stage director.

References

  1. 1 2 Gray, Simon. Simon Gray: Plays 1. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.
  2. "Butley | Samuel French". www.samuelfrench.com.
  3. 1 2 Brantley, Ben (October 26, 2006). "Butley - Theater - Review". The New York Times via NYTimes.com.
  4. 1 2 "Evening Standard theatre awards: 1955-1979". Evening Standard. October 30, 2003.
  5. Gray, Simon (May 2, 2013). Simon Gray: Plays 1: Butley; Wise Child; Dutch Uncle; Spoiled; Sleeping Dog. Faber & Faber. ISBN   9780571307630 via Google Books.
  6. "Simon Gray: Playwright, novelist and author of a series of hilarious". The Independent. August 8, 2008.
  7. "Butley – Broadway Play – Original | IBDB". www.ibdb.com.
  8. "Butley – Broadway Play – Original | IBDB". www.ibdb.com.
  9. "Butley – Broadway Play – 2006 Revival | IBDB".
  10. Billington, Michael (June 6, 2011). "Butley - review". The Guardian via www.theguardian.com.
  11. "Preview: Butley, by Simon Gray, Brighton Theatre Royal, May 25-28". www.sussexexpress.co.uk.
  12. "Butley (1974) - Harold Pinter | Synopsis, Characteristics, Moods, Themes and Related". AllMovie.