Sausage Day cinema

Janet Frame was a waitress at Dunedin’s Grand Hotel when she wrote A Night at the Opera, until now unknown, thought to be written in 1954, and this month published in the latest issue of The New Yorker. A Night at the Opera is set in Park House which squats opposite the door of a hospital kitchen, “like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food.” The patients include a pair of Christs, a Queen of Norway, Millie and Elna. One day in early summer, the Park House Superintendent becomes “determined about the New Attitude” and it is decided to screen films in the dayroom “after the more violently uncontrollable patients had been put to bed.” The first screening, the attendant announces on Tuesday, is The Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. Frame’s novel Towards Another Summer – a novel deemed too personal for publication in her lifetime – is released in the UK in early July. Virago editor Donna  Coonan says: “I was bowled over by the lyrical beauty of her writing, and by how vivid and alive it is, and how courageous; there really isn’t a shred of self-pity. What is most remarkable, though, is her humour.”