Donkeys' Years

Synopsis

Twenty-five years after graduation, six former students return to their university college for a reunion dinner. While their lives may have had varying degrees of success, all are connected by a common past. Locked in college for the night, the graduates begin to relive their youth, with all its chaotic friendships and feuds.

Our Review:

10 May 2006

With Democracy and Copenhagen, playwright Michael Frayn has become as celebrated for his wit and wisdom as for his sheer downright cleverness. This glorious revival of an early farce – premiered in the West End 30 years ago starring Penelope Keith and Peter Barkworth – reminds us that Noises Off, probably the funniest play in English since the Second World War, was no accident.

Well, it was a catalogue of accidents. Donkeys' Years - lovingly set by designer Peter McKintosh in “one of the smaller courts, in one of the lesser colleges, at one of the older universities” - is just as disaster-prone, as the Master’s wife, Lady Driver (Samantha Bond), unwisely abandons her lodgings after a college reunion.

Anyone who has subjected themselves to such an event – at Oxford, they are known as “gaudies” – will recognise the curious mixture of anxiety, nostalgia and masochism such reunions engender and which Frayn catches so perfectl...

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Latest User Review

195.93.21.42) - 2 October 2006:

Read some of the old reviews here - Gerry Shy and Voice of Reason - boy how some people get it wrong! I note the run is now extended to December, and hopefully beyond, I wonder why that is Mr Shy? ...

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