The Sunday Times
26 October 1975
Peter Lennon

Past and Present

IN TERMS OF both style and content it is impossible not to think of Pinter when considering Simon Gray's second Play for Today, "Two Sundays" (BBC1). This time it is a man (Alan Bates) trying to gaze beguilingly at his old school chum telling him he wants to publish a novel which will touch on their youthful "marriage." His old mate (Dinsdale Landen) braces himself watchfully, wondering where old tenderness newly self-indulgent may be about to lay its poison.

Can we take it as a trbute to how considerate, or tactful, men are that the pair don't carry on their smouldering, shrouded reminiscences in front of their women? These (Rosemary Martin and Georgina Hale) are seen child-bedecked and child-encumbered largely oblivious of the tension. Michael Lindsay-Hogg handled the simple contrapuntal narrative of the men when boys and the men as fatigued adults with ease, never using a trick where a trick would be superfluous and distracting.

Since the comparison has become unavoidable it has to be made: the difference between Gray and Pinter is that while with Gray's plays we recognise with approval a deft construction which binds the elements of the play intelligently and satisfyingly together, what we remember from Pinter is a poetic resonance which lives on outside the play, fluting in the murky forests of our own minds.

NOTE: I have included this review, with which I almost totally disagree, for the sake of discussion. It is possible to read "Two Sundays" and "Plaintiffs and Defendants," but unfortunately the performances themselves are extremely difficult to find, since they did not have a commercial release.

What is important to me about the plays is the seamless way the author and performers convey multiple levels of memory, affection, loss, honesty, duplicity, self-deception and self-awareness. This is all overlaid by Gray's wry wit, and given a brilliant ensemble performance that is simply breathtaking. Television is seldom so engrossing: we are so close to these pople that we can read their thoughts.

If you have seen Simon Gray compared to Chekhov, these two plays help to explain why.

-KR, 11/99

Further Reading: Sheridan Morley interview with Bates and Gray

"It was Alan Bates who played the messy, destructive, middle-aged teacher in "Butley." Written by Simon Gray, a university teacher himself, the play opened four years ago, and became a long-running success. Bates has now come to represent the archetypal Gray hero -- and this week he is in the first of two new television plays by Gray. Actor and playwright have established a rare working partnership ..."