
My Place
A Play by the Author of The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy(Author)
Giant Books (Publisher)
Published on 4. November 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
118 pages
978-1-965751-22-0 (ISBN)
Description
Elaine Dundy's follow-up to the immensely successful novel The Dud Avocado was a now-little-known play, My Place, first performed in 1962. Set in the dressing room of an actress who doesn't have a place of her own to live, My Place, according to journalist Bernard Levin, is "as cynical, hip, beat, amoral and generally with-it as could be." Author Clancy Sigal wrote, "The best and most lasting thing about Miss Dundy's play is her depiction of a new race of working-class, provincial, free-living and insecure actors, without traditions or education and needing and resisting both. These are tough, poignant young people, wanting to be themselves but desperately afraid of being phonied up if anyone official, or anything systematic, touches them. In this sense they are symptomatic of that whole social class of 'new wave' young English people. We envy their groping and their embattled pride."
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
143 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-965751-22-0 (9781965751220)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Elaine Dundy (1921-2008) grew up on Park Avenue in New York City and attended Sweet Briar College. A lively presence in New York's nightclub scene, she met figures such as Piet Mondrian before studying acting under Erwin Piscator. After working in Paris dubbing films, she settled in London, where she married theater critic Kenneth Tynan in 1951 and became part of the city's cultural elite. Dundy acted for radio and television before turning to writing. Her debut novel, The Dud Avocado (1958), became a bestseller, praised by Groucho Marx among many others. She later wrote The Old Man and Me (1964), The Injured Party (1974), biographies of Elvis Presley and Peter Finch, and a memoir, Life Itself! (2001). Dundy died in Los Angeles at age 86.