One's heart starts sinking from the first moment of Michael Frayn's play [The Sandboy] when Eleanor Bron drops an armload of cushions to stare at us aghast and go into her embarrassed hostess routine. It is one of those: the audience as uninvited guests. And not only that. We are also supposed to compose a huge television crew who have gate-crashed the house to film a day in the life of her celebrity husband.
I can think of no playwright who has pulled off this particular trick which produces a continuous collision of idioms when applied to naturalistic action. And the fact that Mr Frayn should have lumbered himself with a notoriously unworkable structure amounts also to an internal criticism of the play's content. His theme is the gap between what intellectuals say and how they live: the intellectual in this case being Phil, a city planner, happy as a sandboy translating the structural philosophies of [Noam] Chomsky and [Claude] Levi-Strauss into architecture, while blind to the surrounding debris of domestic collapse. Planning for doomsday, he feels himself immortal.
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