BUTLEY

by Simon Gray

One of a series of children's books featuring individual characters from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" story books. This particular boxed set features four stories of Tigger, with the characters of Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Christopher Robin, Rabbit and Kanga included.

Genres: Plays, Drama, LGBT, Theatre, British Literature

78 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 1971

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

[🐴 🍖]

ok yeah i can see why harold pinter was a fan. some of the cruelest most cutting dialogue i've ever read in a play; sorta makes who's afraid etc look like gilmore girls at points. & the london vs northern england dynamic of mutual disdain is always interesting. & p cool to see how non-stereotypical the gay characters are for sth written when this was written. what grabbed me less was butley's decision at the end not to start tormenting a new protege... granted he's v much been cut down to size by that point but i'm not sold that his compulsion to ridicule would just vanish entirely based on that. won't prevent me from peeping some more simon gray however

[Utrillo Kushner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great thrift store find. I believe I paid less than a dollar for my copy. This play reminds me of Neil Simon though very English and with darker undercurrents. Butley is like The Odd Couple with homosexuality.

[Minu Divân · Rating 4 out of 5]

فف میخوام ازش راستش چی بگم

[Karen S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful! Intelligent, funny, perceptive! (Plan to watch the film w/Alan Bates.) Someone's comment was something to the effect that Butley would go down in history/american conscious like Willie Loman and Jimmy Porter. I'm looking up the latter now. Butley is nasty, hurt, envious, bored, and having a meltdown in life and work, and a fascinating character! Have another of Gray's plays out and a third on hold. . . can't wait.

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butley is an exemplar of the kind of dramas that used to flourish on Broadway but now barely flourish anywhere--a play of ideas and language; of human comedy and tragedy and, ultimately, of great humanity. The play is by British writer Simon Gray and it dates back to 1971, though it doesn't feel one iota dated. It's about an English professor at a London college named Ben Butley, and it charts a particularly awful day in his life--the day when his estranged wife tells him she's getting married to another chap and his live-in boyfriend tells him he's moving in with still another chap; to add insult to injury, these two other chaps are friends and have known about Butley's impending doom long before he finds out.

Now it's entirely to Gray's credit that, though Butley is indeed a repellent and difficult fellow who, on some level, deserves the treatment he's getting, we nevertheless feel--well, maybe not sorry for him, but certainly empathetic; his plight moves us, because it really is the stuff of classical tragedy. Butley has as much hubris as Oedipus, and worse, a good deal more self-knowledge: the play is finally about a man confronting a long, malingering adolescence and facing up to a delayed adulthood. It could be about despairing inertia, but I think it's more about moving on, even when the direction of that movement is different from where one was hoping, or expecting, to end up.

The journey, though, is actually quite fun: Butley amuses himself by making fun of and/or trouble for those who he believes are beneath him, which amounts to pretty much everybody. The victims that we get to meet include his wife Anne, who is learning to hold her own with her caustic husband, and his lover Joseph, once his student and now seeking tenure as a fellow faculty member, who cannot; also Joseph's new boyfriend Reg, a conservative, closeted, condescending man; two students, Miss Heasman and Mr. Gardner; and fellow professor Edna Shaft, who is perhaps Butley's favorite object of derision until he discovers (or remembers) that she's worthy of his admiration.

In the end, rotter that he is, Ben Butley is authentically the hero of this piece, and it seems stunningly fitting that the two people he's lost at the play's end are attaching themselves to significantly lesser men while he may just be able to find the self-sufficiency he needs to push his life forward.

[AverageLanaFan . · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving this play four stars because it was a little boring, but I managed to read it in one day, which says a lot. I think it's one of the only plays which can be read as a book.
The relationships were interesting, albeit dull, which is the point. Thankfully Ben managed to break the cycle in a way. None of the women are shown in an introspective light, again, that's the point. But either the point of the play is for it to be dull like college is for some people (for the professors, in this instance) or I don't get it.
Anyways, it was good. I'll probably read it again when I get a teaching job (hopefully).

[laur · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am SO glad that I randomly happened to pick this play up. Here Simon Gray gives readers (or more likely, viewers) some of the most intriguing characters I’ve ever seen. The story all takes place over the course of a day and in a singular setting, but the relationships develop really deeply even in such a short span of time. Through tons of integrated literary references, we explore the connection between two professors of English as they address their painful growing-apart. Beautifully written, tragic in its own mundane kind of way, and I simply have to direct this immediately.

[Bobby Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't really get good until Reg shows up and takes Ben down. Not even really a satisfying takedown, even though Ben's been spoiling for it the entire play. And then it's just sad when we find out Ben's punches on Reg's family don't land because Joey lied about Reg's family. The melancholy of the ending is very unsatisfying.

[Terry James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the first act. An outrageous character representing the worst of academic life, he is a disaster washing over every person with witty and a challenging cacophony of discord. In the second act, he descends into a drunken hell of desperate loneliness as an inevitable moral lesson but a sad waste of a good mind.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 5 out of 5]

an exercise in stretching the "charm" of the churlish bon vivant to its snapping point -- to the point at which the card reveals himself as cruel and the sociable as self-obsessed. in other words, opinions on the character of butley will vary. all the same, the most important thing is the easiest said: it's v. often hilarious.

[John Geddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very sharp dialogue although the student/mentor relationship probably hasn’t aged well. The British academic setting feels a bit dared and limiting. Even so, it was a fun read and I’d love to see it produced somewhere.

[Michael P. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Many will certainly call me a philistine, but by the time Gray reveals why Butley is the most obnoxious person on the planet, I loathed him so much that I did not care. He deserves his misery. I wish he was not the sort of person who inflicts it on others.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butley and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what's up with the description on Goodreads - anything involving his colleagues isn't nearly as big as it makes it seem, and it isn't a girlfriend that's moving out, it's his co-worker/former student/friend/implied ex. I can't tell if it's just weird because it's implied that the two main characters (both men) were involved with each other, or where that came from, but anyway, no girlfriend.

For a random gay play that I bought at sometime or another, I really enjoyed this. The writing and language were strong, and it made me laugh, even as the characters were self-destructive. Wit definitely defined the play as it went on, and gave it an edge over the fact that I was reading this straight, instead of seeing it performed.

I wish it would've been more explicit at times, even considering the time period in which it was originally performed, but I did enjoy it for what it was. The play kind of jumps around Butley's sexuality (I interpreted him as bi), which was frustrating to read in the sense that it was kind of there, but kind of not. There were other openly out characters (Butley's friend/ex, Joey, and his new S.O.), so having Butley be so ambiguous seemed kind of like a cheat in the story. I've read analyses which connect it to his fleetingness as a character, though, so I guess that makes sense.

I'm honestly not sure if it's just subtle compared to modern theatre, or it's queerbaiting, but regardless, I read it as Butley and Joey were exes (little things stuck out to me in the writing), and I do wish that had been more apparent in the story. That being said, Butley is infatuated with him, and this is a really interesting story of a self-destructive man who starts to see his world crumbling around him. I'd definitely see it live, and I'd definitely pick up other works from this author.

[Albie]

Butley : A Play by Simon Gray (1972)

[Tgg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh hey, yeah, I finished reading this the same day I started this. I forgot to visit my goodreads for a bit. I enjoyed the play and am looking forward to seeing it performed. Should be good.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read with Portland Playreaders

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best play I read in 2011.