Born in Bristol, Christopher Fry is the son of Charles John Harris, an architect who later became a church lay reader, and Emma Marguerite Fry Hammond Harris. Fry attended Bedford Modern School in Bedford from 1918 to 1926. He became a schoolmaster,...

Any mature understanding of violence and pacifism must begin with an acknowledgement of the violence in one's own heart, and in A Sleep of Prisoners … Fry had defined the progression from the recognition of violence within to a complete pacifism. That play begins with the personal violence of Cain and Abel, moves through the political assassination of Absalom by Joab but condoned by David, progresses to the sacrificial offering of Isaac by Abraham, and concludes with Daniel's friends in...

Fry's plays concentrate on a group of closely related themes: the redemptive power of love, both eros and agapé; the wonder, paradoxes and unity of existence; the cycle of life, death and renewal; the operation of necessity and the nature of individuality; and man's relationship with the universe and with God. Several of his plays—The Boy with a Cart (1939), The Firstborn (1949), Thor, with Angels (1948), and A Sleep of Prisoners (1951)—are overtly religious, but the secul...

Unfortunately (and unjustly as well) the name of Christopher Fry has been linked with that nebulous monster, The Establishment. And since the mid-fifties responsible theatre in England, as elsewhere, has been out to get the Establishment. Fry, in my opinion, deserves more than a summary dismissal, a dismissal (for some) decided on by applying the criterion of guilt-by-association…. Christopher Fry has defined comedy as 'an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith�...