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    Honour (NHB Modern Plays)
    Honour (NHB Modern Plays)
    Honour (NHB Modern Plays)
    Ebook120 pages59 minutes

    Honour (NHB Modern Plays)

    By Joanna Murray-Smith

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Playwriting

    • Book Publishing

    • Career & Ambition

    • Theater

    • Family

    • Love Triangle

    • Family Drama

    • Self-Discovery

    • Mentorship

    • Legal Drama

    • Other Woman

    • Age Difference

    • Intellectual Property Dispute

    • May-December Romance

    • Parent-Child Conflict

    • Identity

    • Publishing

    • Theatre

    • Literature

    About this ebook

    An unsettling play about infidelity seen from the perspective of the three women involved: the wife, the lover and the daughter.
    George and Honor have been happily married for thirty-two years. She is a successful writer, he is a revered columnist. They have a perfect understanding of each other. Until a pushy young female journalist - on an assignment to 'profile' George - quite deliberately seeks to undermine that understanding. The fallout is dreadful - but beautifully and convincingly portrayed in all its painful consequences.
    'Murray-Smith's considerable skill lies in charting the minute emotional shifts and the subtle power play between the four people... Superb' - Mail on Sunday
    'Murray-Smith's writing is searching and droll, naturalistic and poetically honed' - Independent on Sunday
    'An old story, but thanks to the quality of the writing and acting we share the characters' sense of sailing into uncharted waters... And there are some excellent comic touches... the piece deserves full credit for its honesty and dramatic grip' - Sunday Telegraph
    'It's an intelligent, powerful, gripping piece' - The Times
    'A really powerful new play. Joanna Murray-Smith is the most exciting Australian dramatist of her generation' - New Statesman
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateDec 4, 2014
    ISBN9781780015361
    Honour (NHB Modern Plays)
    Author

    Joanna Murray-Smith

    Joanna Murray-Smith’s plays have been produced in many languages, all over the world, including on the West End, Broadway and at the Royal National Theatre. Her plays include American Song, Pennsylvania Avenue, Fury, Songs for Nobodies, True Minds, Day One – A Hotel – Evening, The Gift, Rockabye, The Female of the Species, Ninety, Bombshells, Rapture, Nightfall, Redemption, Flame, Love Child, Atlanta, Honour and Angry Young Penguins. She has also adapted Hedda Gabler, as well as Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, for Sir Trevor Nunn (London). Her three novels (published by Penguin/Viking) are Truce, Judgement Rock and Sunnyside. Her opera libretti include Love in the Age of Therapy and The Divorce. Joanna has also written many screenplays.

    Read more from Joanna Murray Smith

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    • 5/5
      Excellent play!!! I use this play with my students for Australian accent work, and this play has rich characters, very truthful dialogue, and a powerful restraint that helps translate the "way" of Australian speech.

    Book preview

    Honour (NHB Modern Plays) - Joanna Murray-Smith

    Joanna Murray-Smith

    HONOUR

    NICK HERN BOOKS

    London

    www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

    Acknowledgements

    Thanks to Carrillo Gantner, and to Aubrey Mellor and Jill Smith and all at Playbox, as well as to Katharine Brisbane, Victoria Chance and Currency Press. Thanks also to Ariette Taylor, Julia Blake, John Gregg, Natasha Herbert and Belinda McClory, who taught me so much about this play. Thanks also go to Edward Napier, John Patrick Shanley, Leslie Urdang, Peter Manning and Ron Kastner.

    For this British version of the play, particular thanks go to Roger Michell. I am also grateful to Matthew Byam Shaw, the Royal National Theatre and, as always, to Sarah Jane Leigh.

    My thanks also go to Raymond Gill for husbanding and fathering so generously while this play was being written.

    Contents

    Title Page

    Original Production

    Characters

    Honour

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    Copyright and Performing Rights Information

    Honour received its British premiere on 21 February 2003 in the Cottlesloe Theatre at the National Theatre. Press night was 27 February 2003. The cast was as follows:

    DirectorRoger Michell

    DesignerWilliam Dudley

    Lighting DesignerRick Fisher

    Honour was revived at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London, on 14 February 2006 (previews from 7 February), with the following cast:

    DirectorDavid Grindley

    DesignerLiz Ashcroft

    Lighting DesignerJason Taylor

    Sound DesignerGregory Clarke

    ComposerSimon Slater

    Honour was commissioned and first performed by the Playbox Theatre Centre, Melbourne, Australia, on 14 November 1995 with the following cast:

    DirectorAriette Taylor

    DesignerTrina Parker

    Lighting DesignerPhilip Lethlean

    Original MusicPeter Crosbie

    Honour was first produced on Broadway by Ron Kastner and Marcus Viscidi in association with New York Stage and Film at the Belasco Theatre in April 1998, with the following cast:

    Characters

    HONOR, a beautiful, elegant woman, around sixty.

    GEORGE, Honor’s husband. An attractive, youthful man, around sixty.

    SOPHIE, their twenty-four-year-old daughter

    CLAUDIA, a striking young woman around thirty

    Scene One

    The stage is in darkness. Only GEORGE’s voice can be heard.

    GEORGE. First and foremost, a communicator. (Beat.) Unafraid to tackle the real issues. (Beat.) No. No. Always ready to plumb the depths of social and political change, he has – he has – convincingly merged an intellectual prowess with literary – no with a literary, no – with a distinctive literary style. No. No. (Beat.) An adventurer into the heartland of a nation’s cultural – An adventurer into the cultural heartland of a nation’s – It’s all a little too pith helmet – Wait a minute – (Beat.) Award-winning – is that awful? It’s probably unprofessional not to mention the awards – Bestowed with the odd literary gong – pretentiously casual – Why not just say it? Recipient of awards too numerous to – No – No – (Beat.) – All right. Okay. (Confidently.) George Spencer has been the authoritative – the single most res(pected) – George Spencer has been the incisive voice of a – the British intellectual establishment has long acknowledged – For twenty – no – for – Love him or hate him – George Spencer, the fearlessly articulate – Fuck! (Beat.) Look, this is awful – so, so – I loathe people who talk about themselves in the third person –

    Lights up. CLAUDIA and GEORGE sit comfortably facing one another.

    CLAUDIA. I asked you –

    GEORGE. Yes –

    CLAUDIA. I need your help. The introduction’s –

    GEORGE. Very tricky –

    CLAUDIA. I need ideas –

    GEORGE. Yes –

    CLAUDIA. It’s so hard to fit everything – to summarise a life in a couple of paragraphs!

    GEORGE. It is an art.

    CLAUDIA. I hope you don’t mind –

    GEORGE. Not at all – not at all –

    CLAUDIA. It’s very interesting –

    GEORGE. Is it?

    CLAUDIA. Oh, yes!

    GEORGE. Because, you know – you know – a lifetime of interviewing can make one an intolerably longwinded interviewee – as if one finally allays one’s sense of outrage at how much more interesting oneself is.

    CLAUDIA. Not at all.

    GEORGE. As an interviewer, one waits interminably for the question that never comes: What About You, Then? So you see, now I’m on the other side – I have a vast impulse to bore.

    CLAUDIA. Well, your impulse is failing you –

    GEORGE. I’m like some ancient explorer reminiscing – Tracing over rivulets of technique, remembering philosophical oceans –

    CLAUDIA. But you’re so inspiring! Some of the others were really, well, lethargic.

    GEORGE. They were?

    CLAUDIA. Yes. Yes. They were just these old men. These irrelevant old men.

    GEORGE. And I’m not?

    CLAUDIA. Last

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