An Unnatural Pursuit and Other Pieces

by Simon Gray

Hardcover - first edition, first printing, in unclipped jacket. Jacket is a little edgeworn; boards and jacket are slightly bumped at extremities. Content is clear, and pages are sound. TS

Genres: Theatre

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Simon Gray's reputation is now in one of those post-mortem dips, but you hope he'd appreciate the irony that in so far as he is remembered, it's more for the dithering and displacement activity of his diaries than for the plays which were theoretically his main work. The relationship between the two is much clearer in this early volume, where the initial idea is to reveal how the sausage is made, the various practical steps and nights of worry which come in between a play supposedly having been written, through its arrival on stage, to the point where it doesn't make it to the West End because the whole project may or may not be cursed. Inevitably, though less so than in later years, digressions do intrude, and fans of The Smoking Diaries can expect the usual spiralling, albeit more likely here to be over whether he's bollocksed everything up with his usual producer, what to do about a certain minor character, and so forth. Plenty of dinners with Pinter, too – who back then was still writing for Losey, though not for much longer. At one point Gray notes that, for all Pinter's characters are normally in some sense trapped, on another level they have more freedom than his own – because Pinter characters are allowed to express thoughts about matters of no apparent relevance to the play in which they appear, whereas his own never are. Perhaps the fact that he allowed himself so much more leeway than his creations is why the diaries lasted so much better than the plays? Even within that, though I'd need to look at The Smoking Diaries again to check, I get a definite sense that the pomposity &c is more deadpan here than it would later become, a little harder to detect as deliberately told against himself – I even fell for it occasionally, at least until we come to something like the couple of pages on the ludicrous amount of coughing one actor is doing in the role, immediately followed by the shamed realisation that every one of those coughs is in Gray's own stage directions, at which point he admits his relationship to the play has become pathological, but also ruefully notes that despite having realised this three days into rehearsals, he would prove unable to learn from it. Or from much else, it seems: the journal section of the book closes with him vowing never to keep another diary, because they only memorialise things you'd rather forget, and of course we know that went about as well as most human plans.

Filling out the volume – which, after all, was intended to be his only output of this type – are various bits and bobs: deleted scenes, before those became a standard extra in another format altogether; a ghoulish account of American transfers; the story of how he began writing for TV, with the wonderful non-disclaimer "I should like to make it clear that I do not hold myself responsible for any inaccuracies in this account of my early experiences as a television playwright. I have merely been as faithful as possible to what I now think it probably seemed like." Curiously, it was over these addenda rather than the course of the book proper that I became convinced I'd love to see Roger Allam play Gray in an improbable adaptation of the diaries. If nothing else, I think he'd give a wonderful account of the bit about the ease and peril of treating white wine as a substitute for alcohol.

Also, any readers who share my overlapping interest in 1980s British semi-bohemian life and 1980s American superhero comics may be as amused as I was by the presence of an actor called Simon Williams, here appearing in very different fare from Arkon IV. Turns out I have seen him in plenty of stuff – Chunky Gilmore! – but somehow the name had never registered before.

[Janelle V. Dvorak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simon Gray circa 1985 sounds much like the Simon Gray I've come to know from The Smoking Diaries--expecting the worst; thrashing about in agony when his plays are being written, when they're being casted and rehearsed, when they're in production; possessed of a highly-developed sense of self-mockery. What you don't have in 1985 is the extreme sense of loss, the sadness, the acute awareness of age, decay and death.

An Unnatural Pursuit & Other Pieces: A Playwright's Journal is an account of the inaugural production of Gray's play The Common Pursuit. It's witty, it's informative and in some places could be subtitled "Harold and Simon Go to the Lyric Hammersmith". I enjoyed it very much.

[Lisa Frankfort · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Simon Gray and have done ever since I saw Alan Bates in "Butley". His journals/memoirs are even better than his plays - he is witty, erudite, consumed by self doubts, bad temper and self awareness. Unlike other memoirs where the writer seems to take narcissistic glee in confessing how bad they are, Gray's neuroses seem to make a famous playwright seem incredibly human. As he paces outside, consumed with anxiety, awaiting the reaction of a longtime friend who is at that moment inside reading Gray's latest play, it is easy to empathize with him. Even if his longtime friend is Harold Pinter.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining account of the stresses and strains of mounting a play from finishing writing, through rehearsals to the final performance. Saw the play years ago but not the production he describes. Had Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall and John Sessions in the cast who were not quite such big names then