THE TIME-KEEPER
by Tony Gariff
Directed by Cecil Hayter
Cast:
Anthony Barber, Val Caren, Glynn Caren, David Gower, Pat Harris, Peter Mcnamara, Michael Moriarty, Ted Scrivener, Peter Wilfrid,
THE AUTHOR
Tony Gariff was a 25-year-old Ealing teacher who had been a member of The Questors for two years when The Time-Keeper was presented at the 1972 Festival. He had first encountered the theatre as an audience member at a production of Mother Courage, although he did not join until two years later. The Time-Keeper, written over an eighteen-month period, was his first play; by the time of its production he had completed a second and was working on another.
Presented as a short companion piece before Time, Life, Sex and You Know What, The Time-Keeper is an intimate two-character study of a man and woman whom Gariff described as “emotionally inadequate, but in different ways”. Both have developed ways of compensating for unresolved emotional difficulties, but their meeting forces them to confront a painful shared past and the effects it has left upon their personalities. In contrast to the expansive theatrical experimentation of Hepburn's play that followed it, The Time-Keeper appears to have been conceived as a concentrated psychological study.
Tony Gariff's short first play received a generally encouraging response, although its brevity led some critics to regard it as little more than a curtain-raiser. The piece concerned a young man obsessed with clocks and watches who, during a job interview with an older woman, develops an ambiguous relationship with her carrying suggestions of a mother-and-son bond and their shared Korean past. R.S. in Amateur Stage found it an interesting piece of writing "in a minor key" and a promising debut, admiring its economy while suggesting that its twenty-minute length restricted its possibilities as an independent work.
M.D.H. in The Stage similarly thought the play admirably fulfilled the requirements of a curtain-raiser, praising its economical dialogue and the effectively developed confrontation between two lonely people. P.B. in the Ealing Gazette was still more positive, describing it as a compact one-acter whose successive revelations kept the audience alert and eager for the next development.
The dissenting voice came from the Hayes Chronicle, which dismissed both plays in the double bill as trivial and meaningless, although conceding that The Time-Keeper was the better of the two and provided opportunities for some good acting.
Overall, Gariff's first play emerged as a slight but intriguing and economically written miniature.
The Ealing Gazette
Amateur Stage
The Hayes Chronicle
The Stage and Television Today
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
THE TIME-KEEPER