on 10 August 1988
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• Peter Laird as Vic
• Jon Strickland as Douglas • Lynette Edwards as Jill,
the media woman 6
Man of the Moment
• Act 1:
Vic Parks is the man of the moment; a celebrity criminal who having spent nine years in jail for a botched bank robbery, has written his autobiography and is now a bona fide television celebrity. Now living in a villa, complete with swimming pool, in the Mediterranean, he has agreed to appear on the TV show Their Paths Crossed. The host Jill Rillington intends to reunite, 17 years on, Vic with Douglas Beechey – the unassuming clerk who foiled the robbery.
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Jill hopes to exploit the irony that although Douglas had a brief 15 minutes of fame and married his true love Nerys (incidentally maimed during the raid), the man who has found success and celebrity is the villain. Expecting jealousy, envy and bitterness from Douglas, Jill instead finds a profoundly accepting, honest and good man who has no regrets about his life and is actually a fan of Vic’s TV show. His only wish being that his moment of fame had lasted a little longer.
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Royal National Theatre
Stephen Joseph Theatre
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Man Of the Moment was completed on 29 March 1988,
opened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough,
bullying the nanny, Sharon.
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பைடு நூலகம்tructure of the text
• Part 1 (paras 1--37) In Vic’s villa Douglas saw Vic insulting his maid Sharon
• Part 2 (paras 38--86) Douglas had a conversation with Vic’s wife Trudy about the bank raid 17 years ago and its influnce to his life.
• Part 3 (paras 87--104) Douglas left; Trudy found Sharon ready to kill herself and talked with her about Vic’s cruelty.
• Part 4 (paras 105--173) Vic talked Sharon into drowning herself and got drowned himself.
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To get one’s breath back
(Para.10)
to let sb have a rest eg. 1/. I need time to get my breath
back after all this running.
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The present text is Act II.
Desperate to get something of value for the programme, Jill - during a one-sided interviewtries to lead Douglas into what she wants to hear. Having failed to achieve her aims, she leaves
the introduction of
the author
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Alan Ayckbourn
born in 1939 British playwright,
actor, theater director,
(best known for his farcical dramas about the British middle class.)
Douglas with a drunken Vic, who cynically explains the art of manipulating interviews. He makes a veiled threat enquiring what Douglas is really after, to which Douglas innocently replies he just wants to exorcise Vic from his and Nerys’s lives. Vic laughs and transfers his attentions to