Two brothers share the house they grew up in, and then share the woman they both love. They have a daughter, but who is the father? Spanning thirty years and offering a new slant on the eternal triangle, Simon Gray’s funny, sardonic new play Japes is driven by involuntary cruelties, damaging accidents of fate of the terrible ravages of time.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fine, absorbing drama works on many levels,
By A Customer
This review is from: Japes (Nick Hern Books Drama Classics) (Paperback)
This is a gripping, disturbing play - the ending is VERY powerful - about the consequences of irresponsibility. Two brothers and one woman have an easy-going, undefined relationship that ends up crippling them all. A child results - whose? Is anyone paying attention to her? This part of the play is very powerfully worked out to its remorseless conclusion. Edward Albee says that a good play is an act of aggression against, among other things, one's equanimity. This play does just that.On another level this play is about the consequences of some of us being talented and others not - one brother is a successful writer, the other is a drunk who must teach in the Third World. The resentments that build over this also play a part in the plays' end. Each is hurt by the other's existence. For a few readers, there is a third level to the play - Simon Gray based the Japes character on his brother, Piers, a heavy drinker who killed himself while teaching in Hong Kong in 1996. I don't know what Piers was really like, but the "Japes" character, for any readers who's lived in or knows Hong Kong, is a good example of the "F.I.L.T.H." type (i.e., "Failed In London, Trying Hongkong"), and Gray provides a moving explanation of the inner motivations of one of those unpleasant/despicable types and gives such a creature some poignancy. In this sense, Japes is an interesting "Hong Kong Book," and can be read after finishing the usual Hong Kong classics: Timothy Mo's The Monkey King, Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong, Jan Morris' Hong Kong, and Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman. But mostly this is a gripping, smart, disturbing play for all of us.
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