Christopher Fry: Poetic Drama in Conventional Setting

Abstract

Christopher Fry was born in 1907 in Bristol. He went to Bedford Modern School until he was eighteen, then took on a succession of theatrical or semi-theatrical jobs: he spent two brief periods teaching, but went back to the less secure but more congenial theatre work again. Among his longer lasting jobs was that of producer at Tunbridge Wells Repertory Company in 1934 to 1936 (at which point he married), from where he went to share the post of artistic director of the Oxford Repertory Company in 1939; he returned to this after the war. Thus his background is more in the theatre than any of his fellow dramatists. From adolescence Fry had written a series of plays, some of which were performed but not published. In a letter-preface to A Sleep of Prisoners Fry reminded Robert Gittings of how he

persuaded me to take a holiday from my full-time failure to make a living, and sat me down, with a typewriter and a barrel of beer, in the empty rectory at Thorn St. Margaret. I had written almost nothing for five or six years, and I was to write almost nothing again for five years following, but the two months we spent at Thorn, to months (it seems to me now) of continuous blazing sunshine, increased in me the hope that one day the words could come.... The ten years in which you loyally thought of me as a writer when clearly I wasn’t, your lectures to me on my self-defensive mockery of artists, and those two leisure months under the Quantocks, were things of friendship which kept me in a proper mind. (III 3)