After ★★★★★ award-winning success at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, The Good Scout becomes the latest Glenn Chandler festival hit to transfer directly to London’s Above the Stag Theatre. Time to get booking!
The Good Scout, winner of the Scotsgay 2019 Award for New Writing at this year’s festival, had its Edinburgh previews at Above the Stag, London’s home of LGBTQ theatre, in July and now returns for a limited four-week season from 9 October to 2 November 2019. It follows Glenn Chandler’s award-recognised earlier hits Kids Play, Lord Dismiss Us and Sandel, which took the same route in 2018, 2017 and 2013, respectively.
In the 1930s, Lord Baden-Powell and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s London ambassador, instigated exchange visits between British boy scouts and Hitler Youth, in the expectation that they would influence one another.
In Bassington, England, the local troop play host to a cycling party of Hitlerjugend – but are the German boys cyclists or ‘spyclists’? For Will and Jacob, two Rover Scouts on the cusp of manhood, it is a visit that will change their lives forever. As war looms, a heart-wrenching, darkly humorous drama about espionage, a scout’s honour and forbidden love unfolds.
The Good Scout, from Chandler’s Boys of the Empire Productions company, is the first-ever play based on this astonishing historical record. In Edinburgh, it stars Charlie Mackay, Amanda Bailey, Lewis Allcock, Clement Charles, and young German actors Clemente Lohr and Simon Stache.