Fry: Plays One

Success came to Christopher Fry after 38 years of living close to poverty. He was born in Bristol, where his father, a poor architect, turned to lay missionary work in the slums. In 1940, after alternating between teaching and acting, Fry became the director of the excellent Oxford Playhouse. As a Quaker conscientious objector, he refused to bear arms in World War II.

He was first discovered by critics and connoisseurs in 1946, when a small London theater staged A Phoenix Too Frequent, his version of the perennial story of the widow who accepts a new lover while mourning beside her husband's grave. Three years later, John Gielgud's production of The Lady's Not for Burning (1949) brought Fry popular success in London and the provinces. This clever medieval conceit was produced in New York, and received the Drama Critics Circle Award for 1950. Sir Laurence Olivier commissioned Venus Observed (1950), a play about middle age, the autumn section of what has come to be a cycle of seasonal plays. The winter play, The Dark Is Light Enough (1954), followed two years later. Set in 1848, during the Hungarian revolution against the Austrian empire, it takes a moral stand against any use of violence. (An antiwar morality play, A Sleep of Prisoners, had been produced in 1951.) It was more than a decade before Fry's summer comedy, A Yard of Sun (1970), was published.

Fry's relation to T. S. Eliot is interesting. Like him, Fry is a Christian verse dramatist. He has set a play (like Eliot) in a church (A Sleep of Prisoners); he has written a historical study of Becket and Henry II (Curtmantle, 1962). An