"Christian humanist playwright who brought a spiritual elan to the drab world of postwar theatre
Michael Billington
Monday July 4, 2005
The Guardian
Christopher Fry, who has died, aged 97, was, with TS Eliot, the leading figure in the revival of poetic drama that took place in Britain in the late 1940s. His most popular play, The Lady's Not For Burning, ran for nine months in the West End in 1949. But although Fry was a sacrificial victim of the theatrical revolution of 1956, he bore his fall from fashion with the stoic grace of a Christian humanist and increasingly turned his attention to writing epic films, most notably Ben Hur (1959).
Fry, who was born in Bristol, came to the theatre via schoolteaching. He attended Bedford modern school, acted briefly in Bath, then taught at the Bedford Froebel kindergarten and at a preparatory school in Limpsfield, Surrey, before chucking it up to found the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players in 1932. He ran the company for three years, directing the English premiere of Shaw's Village Wooing.
He went on to write lyrics and music - including a song called I'll Snatch The Man From The Moon - for a West End revue in 1935, and, a year later, directed a tour of Ivor Novello's How Do, Princess!, a raffish affair that ended in ignominy after the producer spent the investment money playing strip-poker with the chorus girls and one of the assistant stage managers was thrown into prison for bigamy.
Raising his sights somewhat, Fry started writing in earnest as a result of commissions from the church. In 1938, a Sussex vicar asked him to write a play celebrating a local saint, Cuthman, who, somewhat strangely, had pushed his mother from Cornwall in a handcart: the result, The Boy With A Cart, was very much in the style of TS Eliot. Fry's next play, The Tower, written in 1939 for Tewkesbury abbey, was also seen by Eliot, with whom Fry's name was thereafter indissolubly linked.
"I suppose he had some influence on me," Fry once told me, "but, to me, the names of Eliot and Fry always suggested a pair of famous photographers who were around at the time. I first met Eliot in 1939, and I remember asking him what I could do in wartime that didn't mean shooting people. He suggested the fire service, but I told him that I had no head for heights. Eliot said, 'You must specialise in basements.'"
After four years in the Pioneer Corps, Fry turned once again to writing. A Phoenix Too Frequent, an amiable comedy set in a tomb near Ephesus, was premiered at London's Mercury theatre in 1946. The Firstborn, a poetic treatment of the plagues of Egypt and the fight between Moses and his foster-brother Seti, was produced at Oxford Playhouse.
But Fry really found his voice as a result of a commission from Alec Clunes, who ran the prestigious Arts theatre in London, and who gave him £450 to write a play. Fry spent the arctic winter of 1946-7 agonising over the commission and attempting to write with frozen hands. Eventually, he came up with The Lady's Not For Burning, which was staged at the Arts in 1948 (directed by Jack Hawkins) and went into the West End a year later.
John Gielgud played the life-hating ex-soldier who desperately wants to be hanged, Pamela Brown was the suspected witch who does not want to be burned, and the young Claire Bloom and Richard Burton appeared in supporting roles.
The Lady remains Fry's most popular play: the leading role of Thomas Mendip has attracted actors as various as Richard Chamberlain, Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh. Today, one is struck by the way in which Fry's euphuistic language - at one point, the hero describes himself as a "perambulating vegetable patched with inconsequential hair" - overtakes the dramatic action. But in a postwar theatre that had little room for realism, Fry's medieval setting, rich verbal conceits and self-puncturing irony delighted audiences, and the play became the flagship for the revival of poetic drama.
At the same time, Eliot's The Cocktail Party enjoyed a West End vogue, and a new movement was born. Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine, Adam: "In prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of relationship between them: a belief that all things express the same identity and are all contained in one discipline of revelation."
Even at the time, there were sceptics - such as the young Kenneth Tynan - who argued that Chekhov, Ibsen and Shaw had proved that prose was the proper form for contemporary drama. But Fry, through his suppleness and versatility, remained a dominant figure in the English theatre of the early 1950s.
In 1950 itself, he found himself working simultaneously on a translation of Jean Anouilh's Ring Round The Moon for Peter Brook and writing a new play, Venus Observed, for Laurence Olivier's new management at the St James's. The latter turned out to be an autumnal comedy, where The Lady's Not For Burning had been a fantasy of spring; it deals with the Duke of Altair, astronomer and amorist, who bids his three former mistresses to a solar eclipse and invites his son to choose a stepmother.
It was exquisitely wrought; but when the play was revived at Chichester, one felt that the language did not so much spring from the action as weave a decorative commentary around it.
Fry's progress, however, continued unabated. A Sleep Of Prisoners, in which Bible stories sprang naturally from the experience of four soldiers spending a night in a church, was a great success in 1951: "Each of the dreams," wrote TC Worsley, "is dramatically conceived and touched off with that sharp sense of the comic incongruity of things which is Mr Fry's personal approach to life and words."
Fry also wrote the third of his seasonal plays in 1954, The Dark Is Light Enough, which starred Edith Evans, co-wrote the screenplay of The Beggars' Opera for Peter Brook and translated Anouilh's The Lark and Jean Giraudoux's Tiger At The Gates for the West End.
But his form of romantic rhetoric and lyric soliloquy was one of the first casualties of the Royal Court revolution of 1956, which put a premium on prose realism. Harold Pinter, in particular, went on to redefine the nature of theatrical poetry, proving it could often be found in demotic speech. In this new world, there was little room for Fry, and he turned his attention increasingly to film-writing.
In the late 1950s, he was invited to Rome for six weeks to rewrite William Wyler's film of Ben Hur - from the crucifixion to the end. He stayed for more than a year, and virtually rewrote the whole movie. From there, he went on to script Barabbas (1962) for Dino De Laurentis, and the early section of a projected film of The Bible (1966).
He continued, none the less, to write plays. Curtmantle, dealing with the conflict between Henry II and Thomas á Becket, was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, though it was overshadowed by Anouilh's treatment of the same theme. A Yard Of Sun, concerning a series of family reunions in the immediate aftermath of the war, completed his seasonal quartet, but stirred only modest excitement when it was staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1970.
Fry told one interviewer: "There have been times when I doubted whether I was capable of writing anything at all that would not be met with contumely."
For all that, Fry, when I talked to him at his Sussex home 17 years ago, on his 80th birthday, seemed remarkably free from bitterness. He evoked his period in the theatrical sun with great content, praised the work of younger writers - such as Pinter and Tom Stoppard - and seemed to embody the Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity. And he was still writing.
Then, at the age of 93, his old school invited him to write a play to be performed there, and, in 2000, A Ringing Of Bells duly appeared. In June 2001, it was put on at the Olivier theatre on London's South Bank.
For a period in the late 1940s and early 50s, Fry helped to revive English verse drama, to which he brought colour, movement and a stoic gaiety. How many of his plays will survive, only time can tell. But, at his best, he brought an undeniable, spiritual elan to the drab world of postwar British theatre. He certainly deserves to be remembered as something more than the inspiration for Margaret Thatcher's famous remark, "The lady's not for turning".
His wife, Phyllis, whom he married in 1936, died in 1987. He is survived by his son, Tam.
· Christopher Fry, dramatist, born December 18 1907; died June 30 2005 "
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