Play Reading in English – "Five Finger Exercise" by Peter Shaffer

HK English Speaking Union
  • Mon 16-05-2016 7:15 PM - 2 h

Colette Artbar

Free Admission

Synopsis

Peter Shaffer’s first major success, Five Finger Exercise, came in 1958 at London’s Comedy Theatre and placed him firmly within the chronology of the New Drama then sweeping the British stage. Though not as unconventional in subject matter or as influential in defining the shift from the drawing room to the row house as John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Shaffer’s play nevertheless established him as a fresh voice and set a course for more challenging work. Subsequent transatlantic and worldwide successes included The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1984). Five Finger Exercise is a clever and symbolic reference to a piano exercise for pianists. The play has five characters that must “exorcise” their conflicts, and piano music is used throughout to underscore and punctuate dramatically heightened moments. Shaffer has admitted the autobiographical nature of the play, stating in the preface to his collected plays that it “expressed a great deal of my own family tensions and also a desperate need to stop feeling invisible.”

 

The play focuses on the Harrington family, who are spending a holiday together in their cottage in Suffolk, England. The snobbish mother, Louise, imagines herself as something of a Parisian aristocrat; the self-made man father, Stanley, has provided a good life for himself and his family with his success in furniture production; their sensitive son, Clive, about to leave for college, drinks too much, and is look g for direction; the fourteen-year-old daughter, Pamela, is bright, articulate and precocious. The four family members are complemented by fifth character in the shape of a young German music tutor, Walter, employed by the parents to teach Pamela to play piano. Walter acts as a catalyst for the family in facing up to their emotional and psychological problems and working out their suppressed resentment toward one another. However, charming, courteous and attractive as he seems to the liberal-minded Harrington family, Walter himself is dealing with the problem of knowing that his parents supported Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. The play thus explores domestic relations through a musical trope; Shaffer, whose first job was working for a music publisher, was knighted in recognition of his achievements in English language drama and celebrated his 90th birthday this year.

Facilitator: Julian Quail

 

Photo credit:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2e6906b654e64c1628aaeb98019201073b9e8ebe/0_269_4577_2745/master/4577.jpg?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=35d5dfce61d63531f50e67bfca4af015


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