Afterlife

A man who has everything. Money, friends, a beautiful home. And then - pfft It's all vanished. Max Reinhardt, one the greatest impresarios of theatrical history, 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. Michael Frayn's Afterlife is the story of how Reinhardt achieves his great ambition; though 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"The world premiere of Michael Frayn's Afterlife took place last night at the National Theatre, and it was an absolute firecracker." -New York Sun"Afterlife...Michael Frayn's tremendous new play is a piece of history, ...with sharp style and thrilling clarity" -The New York Times

"Reinhardt describes himself as someone whose goal is to "break the bonds twixt world and dream," and Afterlife obliges him by turning his own story into an "Everyman" drama, a consideration of the transience of life and the inevitably of death, often delivered in rhymed couplets-It's clever and, as you might expect from Mr. Frayn, impeccably executed." - London Theatre Journal

"A funny, witty, thoroughly enjoyable evening with more than a few serious ideas."-WriteWords.com