Synopsis
Afterlife - ACTING EDITION
Published by Samuel French Inc
6 Male 2 Female
And then pfft! It all vanished ...
One the greatest impresarios of theatrical history, he had a lifelong ambition to dissolve the boundary between theatre and the world it portrays
Each year at the Salzburg Festival he directed a famous morality play, Everyman, about God sending Death to summon a representative of mankind for judgment
The victim he chooses is a man who, like Reinhardt, rejoices in his wealth and all the pleasures that money can buy
Then in 1938 Hitler declares his own day of reckoning and sends Death into Austria - whereupon Reinhardt, a Jew, is left as naked and vulnerable as Everyman himself
Afterlife is the story of how Reinhardt achieves his great ambition - in a way he can scarcely have foreseen
"In his seventy-fifth year Michael Frayn has produced a minor masterpiece, and maybe not so minor either. I'd guess Afterlife is the best verse drama in English since T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ..." ~ New Stateman
"A magnificent new play ... Frayn exploits to chilling effect the ambiguous border between playing and reality" ~ Times Literary Supplement