For lovers of classic farce, Monty Python and the wildly diverse British sense of humor.
Tony Award–winning playwright and novelist Frayn (Skios, 2012, etc.) busts out a delectably droll collection of theatrical diversions.
As the mind behind the farce Noises Off, Frayn certainly understands this territory, although more cynical and less Anglophile readers may find these 30 comic pieces too ethereal for their tastes, the literary equivalent of a minidessert. The collection is posited as the work of Matchbox Theatre, where patrons are instructed, “Please feel free to obstruct the aisles. Leave luggage unattended! Talk among yourselves! Eat! Drink! Sleep! Snore! Storm out in the middle, if you feel like it, letting your seats thump up and crashing the panic bolts before you go!” The set pieces themselves largely feel like scissored moments from other works, and indeed, some of the farces, notably “Finishing Touches” and “Pig in the Middle,” have been staged but never published before. The opener, “Sleepers,” is a classic bickering-spouses setup in the tomb of an English lord and his wife, ensconced in one of London’s many crypts (“You slept through the Second World War…”). Another absurdist sketch, “Cold Calling,” details the travails of the man whose job is calling to tell you that you’ve won the Nobel Prize. “Clear” is a linguistic puzzle about just what it means to make one’s self “Perfectly clear.” Another features Schnthph Schmfgth, a member of the “Society for People with Names and Numbers No One Can Ever Catch on the Telephone, Unless It’s Something Wrong With Your Answering Machine.” There’s even a self-congratulatory “Interval”: “So, we’re in a book. —For the moment. Or a theatre, of course. Or neither. Or both. It’s that kind of thing.” This is followed by a “Memorial” allowing participants to remember what the aforementioned interval was like.
For lovers of classic farce, Monty Python and the wildly diverse British sense of humor.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941147-50-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Valancourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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