The Two of Us (play)
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The Two of Us is a 1970 play by British playwright Michael Frayn. It consists of four one-act plays for two actors and is Frayn's first published play. It was first performed at the Garrick Theatre by Richard Briers and Lynn Redgrave.
The four plays that make up The Two of Us are:
- Black and Silver: A night in the life of a young married couple on holiday with a new baby. This was originally written for a season of one-act plays by various authors, for which it was not accepted; Frayn then wrote the remaining plays in order to create his own season of one-act plays. They were
- The New Quixote: A young man pursues a relationship with an older woman who met him at a party where she got inebriated, and somehow finds him in her bed at home the next morning. But she doesn't want him.
- Mr Foot: An Englishman seems to have formed a better relationship with his twitching foot than with his somewhat envious wife.
- Chinamen: A farce, revolving around a catastrophic dinner party, in which the two actors play all the characters. (The host of the party remarks, early in the piece, that he has trouble telling his typical English friends apart, comparing them to the proverbial Chinamen that all supposedly look alike.) What the audience sees is only from the front, and they marvel at how the two actors can change costumes and characters so effortlessly and seem completely different people. Frayn later got the idea that it would be fun for an audience to see the frantic activity going on backstage, which is how he came to write the play Noises Off, which became a successful movie.
Lynn Redgrave and John Clark later optioned The Two of Us for a successful 1975 coast to coast United States tour. Unable to find one actor willing and able to play all the male parts, director Clark settled for 3 actors. For The New Quixote he had cast a black actor to increase the woman's dilemma, but when the play reached Elitch Gardens in Denver, the theatre producer refused to let the play go on unless the part was recast with a white actor. Which is what happened for the remainder of the tour, a sign of those times.
