In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), on Saturday 3rd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Michael Billington (The Guardian's theatre critic) gave a conference paper titled “The Plays of Graham Greene”, in which he placed Greene's plays in their theatrical context.
He established that Greene began writing in the heyday of the well-made, West End play, and argued that, although The Living Room and The Complaisant Lover certainly deserve revival, Greene's predicament was his adherence to formal conventions which were being questioned by the work of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and the Royal Court school of playwrights. He suggested that Greene's plays are the work of a skilled craftsman, and he commented upon some of the differences in the ways that dramatists and novelists manage the problem of time.
Michael argued that in his fiction Greene also acknowledged the existence of rules, but in his novels he brilliantly extends the accepted conventions. Greene widened the map of modern British fiction and took it away from parochial concerns. He also raised questions about the novel’s inherent mendacity and the unreliability of the narrator.
Michael Billington is the author of State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (2007), Harold Pinter (2007) and other texts on plays and playwrights.
At the Festival 2010 on the evening of Friday 1st October at the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), Dr. Joe Spence (historian and Master of Dulwich College) will introduce a series of dramatised readings from Greene’s plays. More details will be announced later.
He established that Greene began writing in the heyday of the well-made, West End play, and argued that, although The Living Room and The Complaisant Lover certainly deserve revival, Greene's predicament was his adherence to formal conventions which were being questioned by the work of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and the Royal Court school of playwrights. He suggested that Greene's plays are the work of a skilled craftsman, and he commented upon some of the differences in the ways that dramatists and novelists manage the problem of time.
Michael argued that in his fiction Greene also acknowledged the existence of rules, but in his novels he brilliantly extends the accepted conventions. Greene widened the map of modern British fiction and took it away from parochial concerns. He also raised questions about the novel’s inherent mendacity and the unreliability of the narrator.
Michael Billington is the author of State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (2007), Harold Pinter (2007) and other texts on plays and playwrights.
At the Festival 2010 on the evening of Friday 1st October at the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), Dr. Joe Spence (historian and Master of Dulwich College) will introduce a series of dramatised readings from Greene’s plays. More details will be announced later.
