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Moira Buffini: Plays 2: Dinner; Dying for It; A Vampire Story; Welcome to Thebes; Handbagged
Dinner 'A cracking black comedy that has you laughing uproariously one moment and jumping with shock the next . . . For those with strong stomachs, Dinner offers a delicious feast of comedy and the macabre.' Daily TelegraphDying for It 'A subversive Russian one that addresses the ultimate question of "why live?"' Guardian 'The play, freely adapted by Moira Buffini, presents a glorious gallery of comic types.' IndependentWelcome to Thebes 'It's thrilling. Moira Buffini's strange and daring play is moving, wise, funny, horrifying . . . Full of resonances you weren't expecting, jokes you didn't see coming . . . It raises huge questions with wit.' The TimesHandbaggedWinner of the 2014 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre 'A phenomenon.' Sunday Telegraph 'Perfectly pitched between the comic and the serious.' Guardian
- GenresPlays
577 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 21, 2015
2 people are currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Moira Buffini
38 books184 followersMoira Buffini (born 1965) is an English dramatist, director, and actor.
She was born in Carlisle to Irish parents, and studied English and Drama at Goldsmiths. She subsequently trained as an actor at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.
For Jordan, co-written with Anna Reynolds in 1992, she won a Time Out Award for her performance and Writers' Guild Award for Best Fringe play. Her 1997 play Gabriel was performed at Soho theatre, winning the LWT Plays on Stage award. Her 1999 play Silence earned Buffini the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for best English-language play by a woman. Loveplay followed at the RSC in 2001, then Dinner at the National Theatre in 2003 which transferred to the West End and was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Comedy.
Buffini wrote Dying For It, a free adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's classic, The Suicide, for the Almeida in 2007. She followed it with Marianne Dreams, a dance play with choreographer Will Tuckett, based on Catherine Storr's book. Her play for young people, A Vampire Story was performed as part of NT Connections in 2008.
Buffini is said to advocate big, imaginative plays rather than naturalistic soap opera dramas, and is a founder member of the Monsterists, a group of playwrights who promote new writing of large scale work in the British theatre. She has been described by David Greig as a metaphysical playwright. All her plays have been published by Faber.
Buffini is also a prolific screenwriter. In 2010 her film adaptation of Posy Simmon's Tamara Drewe was released followed by her adaptation of Jane Eyre for BBC Films and Ruby Films in 2011. The script appeared on the 2008 Brit List, a film-industry-compiled list of the best unproduced screenplays in British film. It received nine votes, putting it in second place. Buffini also adapted her play A Vampire Story for the screenplay of Neil Jordan's film Byzantium released in 2013.
She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six for which she wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible.
- Wikipedia
She was born in Carlisle to Irish parents, and studied English and Drama at Goldsmiths. She subsequently trained as an actor at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.
For Jordan, co-written with Anna Reynolds in 1992, she won a Time Out Award for her performance and Writers' Guild Award for Best Fringe play. Her 1997 play Gabriel was performed at Soho theatre, winning the LWT Plays on Stage award. Her 1999 play Silence earned Buffini the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for best English-language play by a woman. Loveplay followed at the RSC in 2001, then Dinner at the National Theatre in 2003 which transferred to the West End and was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Comedy.
Buffini wrote Dying For It, a free adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's classic, The Suicide, for the Almeida in 2007. She followed it with Marianne Dreams, a dance play with choreographer Will Tuckett, based on Catherine Storr's book. Her play for young people, A Vampire Story was performed as part of NT Connections in 2008.
Buffini is said to advocate big, imaginative plays rather than naturalistic soap opera dramas, and is a founder member of the Monsterists, a group of playwrights who promote new writing of large scale work in the British theatre. She has been described by David Greig as a metaphysical playwright. All her plays have been published by Faber.
Buffini is also a prolific screenwriter. In 2010 her film adaptation of Posy Simmon's Tamara Drewe was released followed by her adaptation of Jane Eyre for BBC Films and Ruby Films in 2011. The script appeared on the 2008 Brit List, a film-industry-compiled list of the best unproduced screenplays in British film. It received nine votes, putting it in second place. Buffini also adapted her play A Vampire Story for the screenplay of Neil Jordan's film Byzantium released in 2013.
She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six for which she wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible.
- Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2023
Skipped over Thebes as far too big a cast and having read the first few pages of it could make little of it. Handbagged was enjoyable (hated the title) and I could hear the voices of the characters - but hard to cast, although lovely multi roles for two actors.
Prefered collection from Plays 1. Still very much appreciating how adaptable the writer is - I get no sense of the same voice which is a skill in itself.
Prefered collection from Plays 1. Still very much appreciating how adaptable the writer is - I get no sense of the same voice which is a skill in itself.
April 24, 2022
Dinner: This play is a kind of post-In-Yer-Face meets Noel Coward thing. On the one hand, the play is basically domestic (taking place during a dinner party in someone's home) witty, and urbane (the class implications are established when the working class Mike arrives and is drawn into this world, and the wit is generally dry and brutally cutting). But at the same time, there is a deeply simmering anger, and a kind of confrontational vulgarity and violence that marks the play as clearly contemporary. I think the balance between the kind of urbanity of Coward and the gesture in the direction of Kane's explicit violence balances really well to produce a play that is both challenging and amusing.
https://youtu.be/BcMl6NRHxUE
Dying for It: This is an adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, an early Soviet play in satirical/early-Absurdist tradition. I haven't actually read The Suicide, so I'm not sure how widely Buffini's play diverges from it, but considering she calls it a 'free adaptation' I'm guessing she's taken some latitude (not that that's a problem). The play focuses on an impoverished and unemployed man in the 1920s Soviet Union, who is shamed because his wife brings home a wage while he has no work. So he decides to kill himself. However, when word gets around to the eclectic denizens of a local bar--including an intellectual, a poet, a bohemian woman, and a priest--they each decide to petition the man to put their cause as the reason for his suicide in the note he plans to write. Each of these characters imagines the young man as a kind of messiah for their own cause, and in turn their attentions make him see himself as valuable for the first time in his life. The end of the play features two twists, which I won't spoil, but they raise existential questions about the value of life, the value of suicide, and the value of truth.
https://youtu.be/ASp9RnCjg6c
A Vampire Story: Because this is a children's play (at least sort of), and about vampires, I wasn't sure how much I would like it, but it's actually a really interesting play. One of the most interesting elements of the play is the ambiguity. Buffini doesn't give us any source of authority in the play that we can use to determine what's real and what's imaginary--whether the vampire story Ella/Eleanor composes is actually autobiographical or whether it is genuinely a delusion. There are hints about what might truly be happening, but every hint we get exists in tension with other clues suggesting the opposite. The play refuses to resolve whether Ella and Claire are vampires, or whether Ella's mentally unstable.
https://youtu.be/OCNl_dpqnwA
Welcome to Thebes: One of my favorite plays. See my review of Welcome to Thebes as a stand alone text.
https://youtu.be/bVHCM6R29_o
Handbagged: This play takes on the entirety of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, approached particularly through her relationship with the Queen. Of course, not everything is covered, but the play hashes out a multitude of issues, trying to plot the opinions, views, and ideas (sometimes expressed publicly, but more often inferred) of these two women who shaped contemporary Britain. The play involves two perspectives for each woman--older versions referred to as T and Q (for Thatcher and the Queen, to be clear), and younger versions referred to as Mags and Liz. This division of the two characters gives interesting divergences of opinion, and interesting impressions of historical revision. All of the other characters are played by two actors, and they each play a lot of very different characters, as well as sometimes entering the action in their 'own' identities as actors.
https://youtu.be/vUfxhEjmD1s
https://youtu.be/BcMl6NRHxUE
Dying for It: This is an adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, an early Soviet play in satirical/early-Absurdist tradition. I haven't actually read The Suicide, so I'm not sure how widely Buffini's play diverges from it, but considering she calls it a 'free adaptation' I'm guessing she's taken some latitude (not that that's a problem). The play focuses on an impoverished and unemployed man in the 1920s Soviet Union, who is shamed because his wife brings home a wage while he has no work. So he decides to kill himself. However, when word gets around to the eclectic denizens of a local bar--including an intellectual, a poet, a bohemian woman, and a priest--they each decide to petition the man to put their cause as the reason for his suicide in the note he plans to write. Each of these characters imagines the young man as a kind of messiah for their own cause, and in turn their attentions make him see himself as valuable for the first time in his life. The end of the play features two twists, which I won't spoil, but they raise existential questions about the value of life, the value of suicide, and the value of truth.
https://youtu.be/ASp9RnCjg6c
A Vampire Story: Because this is a children's play (at least sort of), and about vampires, I wasn't sure how much I would like it, but it's actually a really interesting play. One of the most interesting elements of the play is the ambiguity. Buffini doesn't give us any source of authority in the play that we can use to determine what's real and what's imaginary--whether the vampire story Ella/Eleanor composes is actually autobiographical or whether it is genuinely a delusion. There are hints about what might truly be happening, but every hint we get exists in tension with other clues suggesting the opposite. The play refuses to resolve whether Ella and Claire are vampires, or whether Ella's mentally unstable.
https://youtu.be/OCNl_dpqnwA
Welcome to Thebes: One of my favorite plays. See my review of Welcome to Thebes as a stand alone text.
https://youtu.be/bVHCM6R29_o
Handbagged: This play takes on the entirety of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, approached particularly through her relationship with the Queen. Of course, not everything is covered, but the play hashes out a multitude of issues, trying to plot the opinions, views, and ideas (sometimes expressed publicly, but more often inferred) of these two women who shaped contemporary Britain. The play involves two perspectives for each woman--older versions referred to as T and Q (for Thatcher and the Queen, to be clear), and younger versions referred to as Mags and Liz. This division of the two characters gives interesting divergences of opinion, and interesting impressions of historical revision. All of the other characters are played by two actors, and they each play a lot of very different characters, as well as sometimes entering the action in their 'own' identities as actors.
https://youtu.be/vUfxhEjmD1s
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews