Lying Figures

OUT OF PRINT

Lying Figures received its première performance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. Harold Hobson, writing of it in The Sunday Times, called it ‘a surrealist play in language of great subtlety, wit, and beauty’. The Stage called it ‘a strange, weird, compelling drama’, and the Cambridge Evening News ‘an extraordinarily effective new work’. ‘There is an undeniable quality of thought and writing in Francis Warner’s Lying Figures. Here is a play by a poet and philosopher with a superbly controlled outpouring of the English language in all its moods from jokey little puns to the nobility it can bring to love and despair.’ The Stage

‘Francis Warner’s extraordinary imagination often rises to the grandeur of the themes, often fragments so you are left trying to fit together the shattered, glittering pieces. The text is probably a masterpiece.’     Time Out ‘In Lying Figures death may be the theme, but it radiates such an awareness of life and the living moment that the lasting effect is of an almost reverent passion for the pain in joy and for the quick still struggling within the winding sheets of the dead. The scenes reach out across illimitable countries of the mind. . . . . Francis Warner may sometimes tease a little with his strippings, but his naked truths are grave and uncompromising.’     Plays and Players OUT OF PRINT