Office Hours

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Like Alan Ayckbourn and Neil Simon, with whom he is often compared, Norm
Foster is disdained by critics but immensely popular with audiences.
This diabolically clever work by English Canada’s foremost comic
playwright is divided into six individually titled segments. The setting
of each of the stories is an office on a Friday afternoon in the big
city. As Edward Mullally points out in his excellent introduction, the
play’s characters are all intent on holding their lives together by
keeping reality at bay. The denials are achingly funny. A 200-pound
jockey refuses to admit the obvious, a domineering mother insists that
she is not authoritarian, an insecure producer rejects the idea that his
“original” script about a young Englishman raised by apes to become
lord of the jungle just might have been done before. Through his richly
drawn characters, Foster achieves an exquisite balance of the comic and
the near-tragic.