QUESTSTORIES
THE QUESTORS NEW PLAYS FESTIVAL
6th FESTIVAL 1965
THE IGLOO


THE IGLOO
by Kon Fraser

Directed by Alfred Emmet
Cast: 
Jo Arundel, Roy Grant, Mary Jones, Sandra Wainwright-Fahey

THE AUTHOR

Kon Fraser was a British playwright and screenwriter whose work encompassed theatre and television. She began writing her first full-length play after returning from Kenya with her family and while living aboard an old boat which subsequently sank. Two of her plays, Eleven Plus and Sacred Cow, received Sunday-night productions at the Royal Court Theatre

The Questors presented The Igloo in the 1965 New Plays Festival and No Camels in Israel in 1968. The Igloo was subsequently produced professionally at the Edinburgh Festival, with a cast headed by Beatrix Lehmann and Shelagh Fraser

Fraser also wrote for television during the 1960s, including contributions to the BBC anthology series Thirty-Minute Theatre.

  • Article about Kon Fraser in the Buckinghamshire Advertiser, 4 July 1968
  • THE PLAY

    Written very sensitively and imaginatively this play deals with the meeting of a mentally retarded adult man and a 13year old schoolgirl. We see the friendship grow, and the effect it has on his relationships with the other two people in his life - his elderly mother, and the ageing mistress of his late father.

    PRESS RESPONSE
    Kon Fraser's ambitious study of emotional dependency and arrested development divided opinion while attracting widespread admiration for its sensitivity. Reviewers praised the play's compassion, poetic imagination and the performances of Roy Grant and Sandra Wainwright-Fahey, but several felt the difficult subject matter exceeded the author's stagecraft. Critics variously described the work as overlong, melodramatic or structurally uncertain, though most acknowledged the seriousness of its intentions and the emotional power of many individual scenes.

  • Amateur Stage
  • The Middlesex County Times
  • The Daily Telegraph
  • The Thames Valley Times

  • QUESTORS ARCHIVES
    THE IGLOO