Collected Plays

Published 1985

In his autobiography, Ways of Escape, Greene described his foray into playwriting as a middle aged attempt to broaden his art and try a new mode of expression. Even Greene was inclined to think that he did not succeed. However, while I do not like many of the plays in this collection, I admire Greene for attempting to try a new art form so publicly. Most of these play do contain moments of brilliance, particularly within the dialogue.

The Living Room (1953)

When Rose moves in with her aunts and uncle, she has become lovers with her late father’s best friend, her erstwhile guardian. Her uncle is a priest who has been restricted to a wheelchair for many years. He feels useless. He takes it upon himself to counsel Rose and Michael Dennis, Rose’s lover, on how to extricate themselves from this sinful situation and to find peace. Michael is married and was ready to leave his wife, but when Rose and Mrs. Dennis meet, the play enters Greeneland.

Of his plays, this one is the most Greeneian. The writing is tight, perhaps overworked. The ending, although perhaps appropriate, Greene has not pulled off. It seems forced and abrupt, as if he was approaching some word limit and wrapped the play up quick.

The Potting Shed (1957)

Another strange family with an uncle who is a priest. In this case, however, the uncle is the black sheep of the family because the family is dogmatically atheist. His brother, a figure not so different from Thomas Huxley except less successful, is dying. One of the sons of the ersatz Huxley is by his side, his other son is not invited. No one will say why. When this son comes anyway, he sets off a chain of events, with the help of his clever niece that lead him to find out just what happened in the potting shed when he was a boy. In a strange twist, only his father believes it while his uncle, the priest, finds himself unable to believe.

In my opinion, this is the best of Greene’s plays.

The Complaisant Lover (1959)

This play is not a tragedy and Greene claimed it was a comedy and I suppose I’ll have to take him at his word. A love affair turns into a ménage à trois because the marriage can withstand the sexual infidelity. This play is dull: it takes four scenes over two acts to say little. In the second act, the dialogues with the child Robin are funny. The only other noteworthy element is the inclusion, during a trip to Amsterdam, of multiple lines in Dutch.

Carving a Statue (1964)

Greene complained in the introduction to this play that critics sought to read symbols into it and thought that the play’s theme was theological. Greene should have been more charitable to his critics, they were merely trying to ascribe some meaning to this violent and nihilist creation. I suppose his critics were themselves engaging in theology.

A father-sculptor has been trying to carve God the Father for over 15 years. So far, he has finished one of God’s eyes. During this time, he has neglected his son, a simple-minded young man, and all other social obligations. He only cares about completing his creation.

I found myself uninterested in the father’s creation and his monomania. It is hard to connect with person whose problems are so abstruse that they are like emotional aristocrats and even share the same, not so abstruse, faults of the aristocrats in the joke. The only redeeming quality of this play was that I imagined the characters played by Monty Python, as Graham Chapman could have done justice to the character of the father.

The Return of A.J. Raffles (1975)

A play about homosexuals written by a heterosexual who fashions himself an aficionado of homosexual wit, in the mold of Oscar Wilde. The play centers on the exploits of A.J. Raffles, a gentleman thief, and his accomplice and lover, Bunny. (Greene lifts the character of A.J. Raffles from the works of E.W. Hornung. Although Raffles was not openly homosexual in the original books, it was apparent.) The play is supposed to be in the style of an Edwardian comedy and, as little far as I can tell, succeeds at that.

In the process of burgling the Marquess of Queensbury’s country house, Raffles stumbles upon the Prince of Wales (the soon-to-be Edward VII) as he waits for a lover to finish her toilet. Raffles is a likeable character and is able to turn the unusual situation to his advantage, even when his nemesis, Inspector MacKenzie, catches him.

The Great Jowett (1939)

This is not a stage play, but a radio drama for the BBC that Greene wrote in 1939. Greene chose what at first sight seems a rather obscure theme: Benjamin Jowett, the great translator of Plato. I knew of Jowett, as I read his translations of the Republic and the Apology in high school. As we learn, however, Jowett was also a forceful leader of Balliol College, Oxford, who sought to spread higher education to a broader swathe of the population in Victorian England. But at the same time he enjoyed hobnobbing with the cultural elite, despite having grown up in a poor family.

The topic is obscure and parts of the plot and dialogue could only be of interest to someone who attended Oxford, but I still enjoyed this short drama of collegiate intrigue.

Yes and No (1980)

Without a doubt the most self-referential of Greene’s plays. This piece is a dialogue between a director and a young actor during a special rehearsal for the actor, who is having difficulty delivering his lines. The actor’s only lines in the play are “Yes” and “No”. But the director is able to wax on about the meaning of each “Yes” and “No” and how pivotal each is for the play.

This short play approaches sketch comedy and I imagine that a fast paced delivery by the right actors could make this quite funny.

For Whom the Bell Chimes (1980)

This is pure sketch comedy. Fry and Laurie could have performed this. That’s not to say that it’s entirely funny. It has that ponderous quality of many sketch comedies of an amusing situation overexploited over too long a time.

When a con-man posing as a representative of the Anti-Child-Polio Campaign (an ambiguous name…) comes to the door, the well-dressed nervous man in the apartment welcomes him in and offers him food and tea. The nervous man notes how shabby the Anti-Child-Polio Campaign representative’s clothes are and offers to switch clothes with him. The now shabbily dressed nervous man grabs the briefcase with the Anti-Child-Polio Campaign literature and flees the apartment. The now well-dressed con-man decides to steal what he can from the apartment. He finds the body in the bedroom just as someone knocks on the door.