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The Collected Plays
The Living Room ; The Potting Shed ; The Complaisant Lover ; Carving a Statue ; The Return of A.J. Raffles ; The Great Jowett ; Yes and No ; For Whom the Bell Chimes .In these eight plays Graham Greene demonstrates his skill as a dramatist. The Living Room portrays a love triangle, and Carving a Statue , his most innovative play, portrays an artist in pursuit of his masterpiece, a depiction of God the Father. The other plays The Return of AJ Raffles , a glorious Edwardian comedy; The Great Jowett , Greene's only radio play; The Potting Shed ; The Complaisant Lover ; Yes and No ; and For Whom the Bell Chimes .
Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Graham Greene
705 books6,553 followersHenry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 10, 2016
--The Living Room
--The Potting Shed
--The Complaisant Lover
--Carving a Statue
--The Return of A. J. Raffles
--The Great Jowett
--Yes and No
--For Whom the Bell Chimes
--The Potting Shed
--The Complaisant Lover
--Carving a Statue
--The Return of A. J. Raffles
--The Great Jowett
--Yes and No
--For Whom the Bell Chimes
July 5, 2013
"Be it ever so lustful, there's no place like Rome," teased Kenneth Tynan in his review of "The Living Room" (1953), Greene's first play. Otherwise his ruminate abt a Catholic girl, 20, who kills herself because her uncle-priest offers no help on her affair w a married man, is reasonably reverent, though he notes that GGs itinerary on sin has led us nowhere. The play had a hefty London run, but flopped on Broadway, which rattled GG. (Fuk politics. Maybe this is why he was anti-American).
My family had clergy stashed ev'where, so I worshipped at the Pantages, Grauman's Chinese and Egyptian theas in Hollywood during teens and found eternality in atheism. Sumup: I've been backstage.
Greene has good & bad writing here and stuff that sounds like GG parody, which he admits to doing. With these plays, the most fun is guessing when he's doing self-parody. Married beau: "I'm inside her neuroses as I'm inside her house." ~~ Unk-priest: "Hell is for the great, the very great. I don't know anyone who's great enough for Hell except Satan." ~~ Plus: "You know a mortal sin when you see it? You're wiser than the Church then."
Blurts out heroine Rose (same name as our gal in "Brighton Rock") : "When I betray Him, I'm not doing any worse than Peter, am I?" Her lover later opines: "Pain is my profession."
I'm amused by this mellerdramatic taffy, being an absurdist. Rose's suicide is Victorian claptrappery, but..but...GGs setting is deliriously, wonderfully gothic : a house in which rooms get sealed off after someone dies. The priest, confined to a wheelchair, rumbles there with 2 witchy sisters. "Oh, it's all such a mess," blubs Rose.
"The Potting Shed" (1958), GGs embrace of a miracle play, focuses on a hero who tried to kill himself as a tot but regained life. "God is in my lungs," he exults. Exwife sniffs: "I wasn't kissing God when I was kissing you." I find this play tiresome , but Bwy liked. It's not a whodunit. It's a Godunit.
Other plays reflect GG trying to be post-60s with-it, and failing, but "The Complaisant Lover" (rev elsewhere) is a fanciful sex comedy among the bourgeosie. Wifey looks after annoying kids and meals; husby is boring dentist, her lover sells rare books.
Husby asks: "Is something wrong?"
"What could be?" she answers. "I clean my teeth twice a day."
Insincerity is often enough.
My family had clergy stashed ev'where, so I worshipped at the Pantages, Grauman's Chinese and Egyptian theas in Hollywood during teens and found eternality in atheism. Sumup: I've been backstage.
Greene has good & bad writing here and stuff that sounds like GG parody, which he admits to doing. With these plays, the most fun is guessing when he's doing self-parody. Married beau: "I'm inside her neuroses as I'm inside her house." ~~ Unk-priest: "Hell is for the great, the very great. I don't know anyone who's great enough for Hell except Satan." ~~ Plus: "You know a mortal sin when you see it? You're wiser than the Church then."
Blurts out heroine Rose (same name as our gal in "Brighton Rock") : "When I betray Him, I'm not doing any worse than Peter, am I?" Her lover later opines: "Pain is my profession."
I'm amused by this mellerdramatic taffy, being an absurdist. Rose's suicide is Victorian claptrappery, but..but...GGs setting is deliriously, wonderfully gothic : a house in which rooms get sealed off after someone dies. The priest, confined to a wheelchair, rumbles there with 2 witchy sisters. "Oh, it's all such a mess," blubs Rose.
"The Potting Shed" (1958), GGs embrace of a miracle play, focuses on a hero who tried to kill himself as a tot but regained life. "God is in my lungs," he exults. Exwife sniffs: "I wasn't kissing God when I was kissing you." I find this play tiresome , but Bwy liked. It's not a whodunit. It's a Godunit.
Other plays reflect GG trying to be post-60s with-it, and failing, but "The Complaisant Lover" (rev elsewhere) is a fanciful sex comedy among the bourgeosie. Wifey looks after annoying kids and meals; husby is boring dentist, her lover sells rare books.
Husby asks: "Is something wrong?"
"What could be?" she answers. "I clean my teeth twice a day."
Insincerity is often enough.
August 21, 2023
A novelist works alone, Graham Greene once remarked, when recounting candidly as ever why he took a respite, at times, from writing his renowned novels - both serious works laced with humour and "entertainments" laced with darkness - by writing for the stage. For an author, who prized his solitude as essential for his craft, this flippant but yearning need for companionship and creative camaraderie feels bemusing yet touchingly human. Here was a writer not merely seeking accolade as a playwright of an older, finer tradition but one who was indulging the manic facet of his mood to the hilt, pursuing a way of escape from the inevitable shadow of disillusionment that crept up even on the edges of his treasured privacy.
It is therefore only expected to appreciate the eight eclectic plays in this collection as brilliantly executed experiments and escapades of form, genre and milieu for Greene; what is more surprising however is how utterly original and uniformly imaginative these skilfully crafted plays turn out to be. For too long have people narrowed their conception of Greeneland, as the milieu of this author's works is known, into a familiar, if no less compelling landscape - the vulture-blown border town, the despairing fugitive, the hard-hearted lawman and the solace of drink - but even more recognizable than this scene is the relentlessly probing search for God, the tragi-comic deconstruction of love and lust, the rich capacity for hilarity and compassion and an unquenchable thirst for adventure and intrigue. The eight plays in this book contain all these themes, either blended together seamlessly or delving on each at a time.
"The Living Room", the first play in this collection, is a skilfully staged interplay of opposites - a family of aging people and an outsider who threatens to upset their carefully maintained system of fear and belief, building up to a tersely comic and ultimately tragic story of a young girl torn between a past hinting at death and a future hinting at disappointment. The titular room, itself not a living room in actuality but improvised to be so, becomes a quietly simmering battlefield between free will and inevitability, the old and the new, the years of disillusionment and the thin promise of illicit love and even God and an act of defiance to his existence.
"The Potting Shed", again compellingly staged, begins with a father on his deathbed and ends with a cathartic revelation. It carries the resonant echoes of both "Under The Garden"(in its protagonist trying to verify the truth of a childhood incident that has formed his character) and, unexpectedly, "The End Of The Affair", in its tragic twist of a self-destructive bargain made with God. Greene addresses these familiar but profound themes skilfully and brews them into a poignant story of a misunderstood man trying to reconcile himself to his past.
"The Complaisant Lover" presents a Greene in a sardonic mood - a quick-footed comedy of the titular "other man" who tries to escape his role by trying to break the marriage of his lover, but her husband, an impish master of practical jokes, still has the last laugh. Melancholy and mirth rub shoulders together effortlessly, paving the way for a perfectly bittersweet climax.
"Carving A Statue" marks the point however when Greene sets out daringly to experiment with the very rules of drama. The three-act, with each scene as an act, play is the story of a sculptor possessed of a daemon and his vulnerable son, driven to end of his despair. It is alternatively bizarre and tragic, morbidly hilarious and pathetic and it builds to a shocking end as the sculptor, hellbent on his ambition to carve God, transforms from a distracted, indifferent artist to a devilish and decadent guardian who single-handedly or unwittingly destroys whatever hope of happiness or escape his doomed son has. It is audacious, absurd, potentially scandalous and utterly the work of a genius.
The other four plays in the collection are extremely enjoyable "entertainments", though no less incisive or profound than the more serious plays in the same. In these, Greene has his tongue firmly in his cheek and a wink of wicked wit in his eyes. "The Return of A.J Raffles", a rollicking ode to the Edwardian capers of E.W Hornung, successfully and gleefully brings to life the genre with all its drollery and wit as the gentleman thief and hero of the Ashes (and the Boer War too) returns for one more innings only to thwarted by a colourful and cantankerous cast of characters. The dialogue is brilliantly cheeky, the shenanigans are a hoot and Greene even teases out the homosexuality latent in the genre in unexpected ways.
Though written in 1939, "The Great Jowett" is a sprightly little radio play, chronicling in gently irreverent fashion a memoir of Benjamin Jowett and his struggle with his Fellows to become the Master of Balliol (Swinburne and Arnold pop up in memorable cameos) and his own idiosyncratic and quixotic views and opinions in old age. This play demonstrates Greene's understanding of the technique of radio drama, of ingenious aural cues and transitions to take the story ahead and switch from one scene to another effortlessly to portray an entire person crisply and elegantly.
"Yes and No", while short, is a bitterly hilarious satire on modern drama, pitting a pretentious and garrulous play director against the actor for a minor role whose only responses to the former's relentless questions are the said syllables. In the last play, "For Whom The Bell Chimes?", Greene goes out fully on a limb, churning out an outrageous lark of mistaken identities, confidence tricks, seedy murder and even kitchen-sink satire served with a thick sauce of macabre comedy. This three-act play is crammed with horror and hilarity served by a master storyteller in a blistering, brilliant fashion.
What Greene accomplished with these plays is something unique yet reassuringly familiar in its brilliance. There are all those skills of believable characterization and crisp storytelling that had always been his most recognizable strengths. The dramatis personae of these plays too are fleshed out so convincingly that we believe all their incongruities and eccentricities and discover real people of flesh and blood, of flaws and virtues, in them. The dialogue is typically punchy and crackling with empathy and wit. And his grasp of both light-hearted frivolity and complex subjects is ever so admirable. But these plays, being ingeniously executed experiments of form, also reveal his inexhaustible reserve of imagination, a gift for comedy that even rivals that of his peer Evelyn Waugh and a courage to render the implausible as convincing - qualities that distinguish him as truly the most consistently original and thrilling storyteller of the twentieth century.
It is therefore only expected to appreciate the eight eclectic plays in this collection as brilliantly executed experiments and escapades of form, genre and milieu for Greene; what is more surprising however is how utterly original and uniformly imaginative these skilfully crafted plays turn out to be. For too long have people narrowed their conception of Greeneland, as the milieu of this author's works is known, into a familiar, if no less compelling landscape - the vulture-blown border town, the despairing fugitive, the hard-hearted lawman and the solace of drink - but even more recognizable than this scene is the relentlessly probing search for God, the tragi-comic deconstruction of love and lust, the rich capacity for hilarity and compassion and an unquenchable thirst for adventure and intrigue. The eight plays in this book contain all these themes, either blended together seamlessly or delving on each at a time.
"The Living Room", the first play in this collection, is a skilfully staged interplay of opposites - a family of aging people and an outsider who threatens to upset their carefully maintained system of fear and belief, building up to a tersely comic and ultimately tragic story of a young girl torn between a past hinting at death and a future hinting at disappointment. The titular room, itself not a living room in actuality but improvised to be so, becomes a quietly simmering battlefield between free will and inevitability, the old and the new, the years of disillusionment and the thin promise of illicit love and even God and an act of defiance to his existence.
"The Potting Shed", again compellingly staged, begins with a father on his deathbed and ends with a cathartic revelation. It carries the resonant echoes of both "Under The Garden"(in its protagonist trying to verify the truth of a childhood incident that has formed his character) and, unexpectedly, "The End Of The Affair", in its tragic twist of a self-destructive bargain made with God. Greene addresses these familiar but profound themes skilfully and brews them into a poignant story of a misunderstood man trying to reconcile himself to his past.
"The Complaisant Lover" presents a Greene in a sardonic mood - a quick-footed comedy of the titular "other man" who tries to escape his role by trying to break the marriage of his lover, but her husband, an impish master of practical jokes, still has the last laugh. Melancholy and mirth rub shoulders together effortlessly, paving the way for a perfectly bittersweet climax.
"Carving A Statue" marks the point however when Greene sets out daringly to experiment with the very rules of drama. The three-act, with each scene as an act, play is the story of a sculptor possessed of a daemon and his vulnerable son, driven to end of his despair. It is alternatively bizarre and tragic, morbidly hilarious and pathetic and it builds to a shocking end as the sculptor, hellbent on his ambition to carve God, transforms from a distracted, indifferent artist to a devilish and decadent guardian who single-handedly or unwittingly destroys whatever hope of happiness or escape his doomed son has. It is audacious, absurd, potentially scandalous and utterly the work of a genius.
The other four plays in the collection are extremely enjoyable "entertainments", though no less incisive or profound than the more serious plays in the same. In these, Greene has his tongue firmly in his cheek and a wink of wicked wit in his eyes. "The Return of A.J Raffles", a rollicking ode to the Edwardian capers of E.W Hornung, successfully and gleefully brings to life the genre with all its drollery and wit as the gentleman thief and hero of the Ashes (and the Boer War too) returns for one more innings only to thwarted by a colourful and cantankerous cast of characters. The dialogue is brilliantly cheeky, the shenanigans are a hoot and Greene even teases out the homosexuality latent in the genre in unexpected ways.
Though written in 1939, "The Great Jowett" is a sprightly little radio play, chronicling in gently irreverent fashion a memoir of Benjamin Jowett and his struggle with his Fellows to become the Master of Balliol (Swinburne and Arnold pop up in memorable cameos) and his own idiosyncratic and quixotic views and opinions in old age. This play demonstrates Greene's understanding of the technique of radio drama, of ingenious aural cues and transitions to take the story ahead and switch from one scene to another effortlessly to portray an entire person crisply and elegantly.
"Yes and No", while short, is a bitterly hilarious satire on modern drama, pitting a pretentious and garrulous play director against the actor for a minor role whose only responses to the former's relentless questions are the said syllables. In the last play, "For Whom The Bell Chimes?", Greene goes out fully on a limb, churning out an outrageous lark of mistaken identities, confidence tricks, seedy murder and even kitchen-sink satire served with a thick sauce of macabre comedy. This three-act play is crammed with horror and hilarity served by a master storyteller in a blistering, brilliant fashion.
What Greene accomplished with these plays is something unique yet reassuringly familiar in its brilliance. There are all those skills of believable characterization and crisp storytelling that had always been his most recognizable strengths. The dramatis personae of these plays too are fleshed out so convincingly that we believe all their incongruities and eccentricities and discover real people of flesh and blood, of flaws and virtues, in them. The dialogue is typically punchy and crackling with empathy and wit. And his grasp of both light-hearted frivolity and complex subjects is ever so admirable. But these plays, being ingeniously executed experiments of form, also reveal his inexhaustible reserve of imagination, a gift for comedy that even rivals that of his peer Evelyn Waugh and a courage to render the implausible as convincing - qualities that distinguish him as truly the most consistently original and thrilling storyteller of the twentieth century.
June 8, 2021
Greene is one of my favorite novelists, and the quarantine has given me time to read his non-ficiton, his letters, essays, and now his plays. None of them are as good as his novels!
This collection of Greene's eight plays go in chronological order, so the heavy, famous, Catholic plays come first. Reading them, I was reminded of the playwright in "Bullets Over Broadway" who asks his leading lady what was her favorite part of his script, and she says, "The stage directions." Greene's stage directions are pretty funny, in contrast to the dialogue, which can be pretty tough going.
So I was very pleasantly surprised by the later, lighter, gosh-darn goofy plays in the collection, written when Greene was well into his 80s and in an antic mode. The Return of Raffles, Yes and No, and For Whom the Bell Chimes may not be great plays but they are very good fun. Dialogue as funny as the stage directions, if not funnier.
This collection of Greene's eight plays go in chronological order, so the heavy, famous, Catholic plays come first. Reading them, I was reminded of the playwright in "Bullets Over Broadway" who asks his leading lady what was her favorite part of his script, and she says, "The stage directions." Greene's stage directions are pretty funny, in contrast to the dialogue, which can be pretty tough going.
So I was very pleasantly surprised by the later, lighter, gosh-darn goofy plays in the collection, written when Greene was well into his 80s and in an antic mode. The Return of Raffles, Yes and No, and For Whom the Bell Chimes may not be great plays but they are very good fun. Dialogue as funny as the stage directions, if not funnier.
November 20, 2016
A variable collection.
The opener is a strong, reflective play about a trio of old siblings living together, who welcome a newly motherless niece into their midst and then wish to cling onto her. Theological matters then play out and doctrine competes with freedom for the meddlesome and terrified family.
The Potting Shed featured a young John Gielgud in a key role. Years before something unpleasant happened in the shed of the title and now an extended family must come together to explore the cause of the rifts that have turned brother against brother. Once again, set against a theme of faith and faithlessness, this feels like classic Greene.
The Complaisant Lover is a tight and affecting play about infidelity. This time initially directed by Gielgud, the quality of the material means that this is another high point.
Carving a Statue is about fathers, sons and art. While the universality of these themes makes this still relevant today, the casual way that the molestation of young girls is weaved into the story makes it difficult to palate.
As far as I can tell, the Raffles play has never been produced and it is not so difficult to see why. It feels like a period piece and is a farce but while the plot has some skill in construction, the self-regarding bourgeois feel of the whole thing makes it decidedly not my cuppa.
Radio play The Great Jowett is a biographical piece about a former Dean from Greene's college, whom he seems to clearly admire. This feels heartfelt and, as a result, is worth the read.
The final two were presented as a double-bill. Yes and No is a short play (almost a sketch) with a main conceit that, once tumbled, then plays its way out fairly predictably. The farce that follows is competent at best, although the occasional ice cold line delivers a hit of pure Greene that shows that you never lose "it," even if it does decline with age,
The opener is a strong, reflective play about a trio of old siblings living together, who welcome a newly motherless niece into their midst and then wish to cling onto her. Theological matters then play out and doctrine competes with freedom for the meddlesome and terrified family.
The Potting Shed featured a young John Gielgud in a key role. Years before something unpleasant happened in the shed of the title and now an extended family must come together to explore the cause of the rifts that have turned brother against brother. Once again, set against a theme of faith and faithlessness, this feels like classic Greene.
The Complaisant Lover is a tight and affecting play about infidelity. This time initially directed by Gielgud, the quality of the material means that this is another high point.
Carving a Statue is about fathers, sons and art. While the universality of these themes makes this still relevant today, the casual way that the molestation of young girls is weaved into the story makes it difficult to palate.
As far as I can tell, the Raffles play has never been produced and it is not so difficult to see why. It feels like a period piece and is a farce but while the plot has some skill in construction, the self-regarding bourgeois feel of the whole thing makes it decidedly not my cuppa.
Radio play The Great Jowett is a biographical piece about a former Dean from Greene's college, whom he seems to clearly admire. This feels heartfelt and, as a result, is worth the read.
The final two were presented as a double-bill. Yes and No is a short play (almost a sketch) with a main conceit that, once tumbled, then plays its way out fairly predictably. The farce that follows is competent at best, although the occasional ice cold line delivers a hit of pure Greene that shows that you never lose "it," even if it does decline with age,
April 26, 2025
Greene is one of my go-to novelists, but I must say that IMHO his plays have not aged well. The Catholic themes of the time – present in most of the volume – feel stale and irrelevant now. And once you take those away, there is little left for the modern reader other than a little frothy dialogue now and again and an overarching sense of gloom. Learning point for me: Just because someone is a brilliant novelist and journalist does not mean you will be blown away by their playscripts.
March 20, 2021
This Collected Plays is an easy one to check off my list in READING GRAHAM GREENE IN THE PANDEMIC – because I have already read and reviewed each of his eight published plays in their separate editions. So, I will just add the information that Greene wrote five more plays that were never published (according to his bibliographer, Jon Wise, pp. 330-331): The Clever Twist, The Heart of the Matter, The Horror Comic (1956), A House of Reputation, and Oh, Damn Your Moraity. Only A House of Reputation, was ever performed, and this only as a “rehearsed reading” in 2000 at Berkhamsted Collegiate School (Greene’s alma mater). Norman Sherry, Greene’s authorized biographer, gives considerable attention to this play in Vol. III, pp. 301-310. Greene at one point (1958) had disingenuously suggested that he not written any such play, but manuscripts exists in several place (the Harry Ransom Research Center at the Univ. of Texas, Austin; the John J. Burns Library Boston; and a personal copy with Brian Forbes the novelist and director). Sherry quotes Forbes as say that the play is “quintessential Greene: curious, witty, fascinating and reflecting his view of brothels (at least the type represented here) as being both unique and necessary.”
This book was published in 1985 in London by Penguin and is available only in paperback.
This book was published in 1985 in London by Penguin and is available only in paperback.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews