BFI Southbank celebrates the tragi-comic screen dramas of the late Simon Gray. A writer of immense wit and intellectual charm whose razor-sharp dialogue is unsurpassed. The month long season features some of Gray’s most celebrated work including screenings of Unnatural Pursuits (1992), After Pilkington (1987) and They Never Slept (1991) which feature performances by British acting elite including Alan Bates, Edward Fox and Miranda Richardson.
Following the screening of They Never Slept, a panel of guests including producer Kenith Trodd, and directors Udayan Prasad and Christopher Morahan will discuss his great contribution to television drama and the theatre illustrated with clips of some of his early and rare television plays to be chaired by Broadcaster Matthew Sweet. After the screening of Butley on Sunday 14 Aug, Lindsay Posner, director of the 40th anniversary revival of the play currently running at the Duchess Theatre will also be welcomed to the BFI stage for a Q&A.
Gray wrote prolifically from the mid-60s onwards for both the West End stage (Otherwise Engaged, Quartermaine’s Terms, The Late Middle Classes, Butley) and for television, where such important early successes such as Death of a Teddy Bear, Man in a Sidecar andThe Caramel Crisis were carelessly wiped. His most fertile period writing specifically for TV occurred between 1975 and 1993 during a close collaboration with producer Kenith Trodd and four major directors, Michael Lindsay- Hogg, Christopher Morahan, Udayan Prasad and Pat O’Connor. They encouraged Simon to move away from a theatrical style into a more filmic idiom and to capture more intensely the ironic and often cruel tone demanded by his work – light witty comedy but with a very dark undertone. Perhaps this was one quality that attracted Harold Pinter to direct much of his friend Gray’s stage work (and the movie of Butley), because it is so different from his own in its outpouring of dialogue, and yet at the same time so carefully formed and controlled.
Often concerned with the writer’s plight, as in the International Emmy-winning Unnatural Pursuits (1992), his screenplays were deeply unfashionable in their lack of any overt political content. Ironically, it is precisely this lack of political edge that gives the works their abiding relevance. By using the universal language of humour they speak to us all. Gray once told Trodd that to succeed in the West End he had only to charm an audience for a couple of hours with a single idea, but for the 90 minutes of a film or TV drama, ‘the turns, jokes and surprises had to keep coming all the way through’. As this season demonstrates, on this credo he more than delivers.
The BFI Southbank is open to all. BFI members are entitled to a discount on all tickets. BFI Southbank Box Office tel: 020 7928 3232. Unless otherwise stated tickets are £9.50, concs £6.75 Members pay £1.50 less on any ticket. Website www.bfi.org.uk/southbank
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