Transcript Theme Man of the Moment

Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Lesson Five
Man of the Moment
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
I.
Author
Alan Ayckbourn, born in 1939, British
playwright, actor, and theater director, best
known for his farcical dramas about the British
middle class. He went straight into the theatre
as a stage manager after leaving school. He is
now a full-time theatre director. Working both
at the Royal National Theatre in London and at
the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round,
Scarborough. He has written over 50 comedies,
many of them works of startling technical
ingenuity with surprising quantities of pain and
sorrow in them.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
I.
Author
He is one of the world’s most
commercially successful dramatists,
and has demonstrated over a long and
constantly evolving career that it is
possible to both a popular and a
serious artist. He has been called
“wildly funny and deeply tragic”, “a
left-wing writer using a right-wing
form”, and “the most acute analyst of
contemporary British society”,
although he occasionally insists that
his only intention is to entertain.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
I.
Author
Ayckbourn’s plays are often noted for their
interesting use of theatrical sets, as in The
Norman Conquests, a trilogy of plays that show,
respectively, simultaneous events in the dining
room, living room, and garden of the same
house during one weekend. The plays House
(1999) and Garden (1999) take place on a
single day and were designed to be performed
simultaneously, by the same cast, in adjacent
theaters. As Ayckbourn’s writing has matured,
the themes of his plays have become more
serious and the farce has become darker.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
II.
Synopsis of Act I
The present text is Act II. The story goes like
this in Act I:
It was 17 years ago that Vic Parks and
Douglas Beechey first met, when Vic attempted
to rob the bank where Douglas worked. Douglas
foiled the robbery and became a hero, feted by
the media. Meanwhile Vic was sentenced to a
10-year prison sentence.
Seventeen years on and where are they both?
The media attention soon faded for mild
mannered Douglas and he drifted back into
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
II.
Synopsis of Act 1
obscurity, leaving the bank to work for a double
glazing company.
Vic meantime discovered an interest and
talent for writing whilst in prison and
proceeded to develop a successful publishing
and then TV career upon finishing his sentence.
Now living in a villa, complete with
swimming pool, in Spain, Vic has agreed to
appear in the TV show “Their Paths Crossed”.
The host Jill Rillington intends to bring together,
17 years on, Vic with Douglas Beechey—the
unassuming clerk who foiled the robbery.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
II.
Synopsis of Act 1
Jill hopes to exploit the irony that although
Douglas had a brief 15 minutes of fame and
married his true love—incidentally maimed during
the raid—the man who has found true success
and celebrity is the villain. Expecting jealousy,
envy and bitterness from Douglas.
Now they are to be reunited at Vic’s
Mediterranean home. How will they react to
seeing each other once again and what effect will
their meeting have on Vic’s long suffering wife
Trudy?
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
III. Archive for Man of the
Moment
Man of the Moment is one of
Ayckbourn’s typically very dark comedies in
which nothing is quite what it seems or as
clear cut as appearances would first indicate.
The play was presented in London in 1990,
becoming a joint winner of the Evening
Standard Best Comedy Award in the same
year. In 1990 it was also nominated for “the
Play of the Year”.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
IV. An Interview with Alan
Ayckbourn
Clare Coulson interviews Sir Alan Ayckbourn
and gives a brief insight into the mind of Britain’s
most famous contemporary playwright.
Q: Where do you get your inspiration from?
A: Various places, snatches; fragments; I wait for
them to accumulate. I never start a play with
one idea, usually several, usually one is the
•
theme. The theme
really just occurs, I
sometimes look around deliberately but most
ideas have been expressed before, it’s finding
a different way to tell it. I've gone through
various convoluted ways of telling stories,
some interesting and unusual,
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
IV. An Interview with Alan
Ayckbourn
Damsels in Distress (three plays currently
showing at Durham’s Gala Theatre) are
examples of that, they share the same set and
company but change their personality with
each totally different play. A lot of good work
comes from actors working together and
trusting one another. I don’t know where the
ideas come from in the end is the short
answer!
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
IV. An Interview with Alan
Ayckbourn
Q: You said that there’s a bit of you in every
character and that there was a bit of your
mother in Mrs. Saxon, I was wondering how
this is the case as your characters are so
diverse and such separate entities?
A: There’s bits of me. I can remember writing
Kelly, feeling like Kelly. They all stem from
something within myself. I think there is a
male and female side within all of us. Mine are
relatively balanced. There seems to be quite a
lot
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
IV. An Interview with Alan
Ayckbourn
to draw on because of this. Men have a lot of
problems writing about women because they
don’t see the similarities.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Plot: seventeen years after the bank raid, the ex-bank
robber and the hero are brought together again to
see how different fate has affected their lives.
Scene: in Vic’s Spanish villa
Protagonists: Vic (the ex-convict) & Douglas (the hero)
Conflicts: go to Conflicts
Climax: go to Climax
Writing techniques: go to Writing devices
Theme: go to the next page
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Theme
Man of the Moment is a play about, among
other things, representation, truth, reality,
hyper reality and hyper consumerism, above
all, a meditation on fame and morality.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Conflicts
Major conflict: Vic v.s Douglas
Minor conflicts: Vic v.s Trudy
Vic v.s Sharon
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Climax
Sharon killed Vic in the swimming pool,
bringing every conflict to a close.
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To be continued on the next page.
Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Sarcasm
Study the following sentences. Pay attention to
the tone.
1. Do you know the reason why you’re sitting
there like a great bowl of pork dripping?
(Para. 14)
2. It comes of being surrounded by people who
nod at him all day at work. He prefers us all
to nod at home too… (Para. 36)
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sarcastic
tone
Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Sarcasm
3. And if you are honestly clinging on to life in
the hope of getting one tiny scrap of care and
consideration back from that self-centered,
selfish man, then all I can say is, you’d better
jump in there now, Sharon, and cut your
losses. (Para. 104)
4. Nobody would miss her except the national
union of bakers… (Para. 137)
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sarcastic
tone
Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Sarcasm
What is sarcasm?
Sarcasm is a form of irony that is
widely used in English especially when people
are being humorous. Generally the sarcastic
speaker or writer means the exact opposite
of the word they use, often intending to be
rude or to laugh at the person the words are
addressed to.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
The Dark Side of Fame
Many creative people actively pursue fame,
or at least endure
it, as a way to advance
their careers. But fame may also be driven
by hidden emotional needs, and can lead to
harmful expectations and distorted thinking on
both sides.
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blanks.
Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Author J. K. Rowling in the aftermath of her
success with “Harry Potter” commented that
_______
people wanted her emotions “to be
very simple . They wanted me to say, ‘I was
poor and I was unhappy, and now I've got money
and I'm really happy.’ And it's what we all want
to see when the quiz winner wins the big prize,
you know. You want to see some jumping up
and down, for everything to be
very uncomplicated .”
But that is not her reality, she said: “The fact
pure
is, I was living a very
life. There was
no press
involvement, there was no pressure.
Life was very pure and it became more
complicated.”
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
When you are famous enough, it seems,
you are no longer simply a human being to
some journalists, who seem to use fame as
an excuse to set aside ordinary considerations
of respect and propriety. People who “need”
fame may tolerate a lot of disrespect to get more
attention.
Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at
Cornell Medical School, developed the concept of
acquired situational narcissism to explain some
of the grandiose fantasies and other distortions
prey
people can be
to after gaining high
levels of fame.
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Lesson 5—Man of the Moment
Someone with a true disorder of
narcissism may have a grandiose sense of
self-importance, exaggeratedview of their
talents, with fantasies about power, love
and success. But they may also suffer from
unstable
_________
relationships, substance abuse and
_________
behaviour.
erratic
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