About the Play:

Hidden Laughter is a full-length dramatic comedy by Simon Gray. A literary agent and his wife buy a cozy weekend cottage where she can write, children will be happy, and they can relax. Into their world walks the local vicar, a classically comic character, who tends their magnificent garden and their emotional if not spiritual needs as the outside world intrudes with failure and disillusionment.

Hidden Laughter is a hilarious look at the artistic pretensions of the young and the rich, which takes it's title from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" ("the hidden laughter/of children in the foliage"). Harry is a London literary agent. Louise is a would-be writer. They are young and happily married. The play opens in 1980 in the garden of an initially idyllic-seeming Devon country house ("Little Paradise"), that Harry and Louise are preparing to buy as a weekend refuge from the stress of the city. It is a place where she can write, where small children will be happy, and where they can both relax. Into their country garden walks an especially memorable character, a local churchman, the Rev. Ronnie, who with some surprising revelations about faith, brings doubt into Harry and Louise's smug existence. Hidden Laughter follows the family's fortunes over a decade of slow self-destruction in a subtle study of selfishness. As everyone grows up or grows older, country life seems to bring less and less joy and peace and proves to be quite the opposite of the idyll they envisage.

Hidden Laughter premiered in 1990 at the Theatre Royal in Brighton, England and moved to the Vaudeville Theatre in the commercial heart of British theatre, the West End of London. It was directed by Simon Gray. The American premiere was in 1992 at Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male

What people say:

"A sad divine comedy, superbly written. Gray nurses his characters and cares for them, but he never pampers them, or pities them, or presumes to use them as his spokesman. In this respect, he has become an English Chekhov... At the same time, Gray dispenses some of the incandescent malice and moral savagery of Coward at his acid best... But, of course, comparisons can only help you get your bearings. Gray is entirely his own man in this painful, querulous, warm, hard and mature play." — Sunday Times (London)

"Vibrant.... Full of quiet strengths and gentle virtues that can make it an absorbing and moving experience.... Wonderful comedy." — New York Daily News

"This fascinating play, his best in years, contains moments of hilarious comedy and others of bleak domestic tragedy." — Daily Telegraph (London)

"A subtle and moving play." — The Guardian (UK)

"Simon Gray's Hidden Laughter is currently the biggest dramatic hit in the West End." — The Globe and Mail

About the Playwright:

Simon Gray (1936-2008) was a prolific British playwright, novelist, and screenwriter of dark comedies, who alternately lived in Canada and England, attending Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the University of Cambridge. While working as a university lecturer in both countries, he authored of over thirty plays, most notably Butley and Otherwise Engaged, both of which earned him Tony nominations. He also wrote many plays for television and radio, several novels, and eight memoirs. Simon Gray was appointed CBE in 2005 for services to drama and literature.