Afterlife - ACTING EDITION

Max Reinhardt was a man who had everything - money, friends, a beautiful home

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