Final casting has been announced for the first complete London revival of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 since 1936, being staged by Jermyn Street Theatre as part of its The Reaction Season.
NEWS: Revival of Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 leads Jermyn Street’s four-month Reaction season
Jermyn Street Theatre’s The Reaction Season, running from 10 April to 18 August, will feature 15 plays and musicals – 12 of them one-act – based around themes of reacting and re-enacting.
JANE EYRE – National Theatre
Jane Eyre is one of those mythical stories that make their home in your imagination. Where they can chat, sing and dance through your unconscious for years and years and years.
JANE EYRE – Touring
2017 marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s most famous piece, a tale of passion, justice and madness set against the backdrop of Yorkshire’s haunting moors. Director Sally Cookson’s adaptation is set amongst a bare wooden frame, with platforms on varying levels used throughout the performance.
HAY FEVER – Edinburgh
Solidly acted but only sporadically funny, the Lyceum and the Citizens Theatre co-production of Hay Fever is entirely serviceable but all too forgettable. Noel Coward’s 1925 comedy features the selfish, eccentric and theatrical Bliss family, who have each separately invited a guest for the weekend at their Thames-side Berkshire home.
THE DOVER ROAD – Jermyn Street Theatre
It’s eerie that the morning after The Dover Road, I’m driving down the Dover road to a weekend in Kent, and Radio 4 is bemoaning the fact that no-one drives for the pleasure of it any more. Well, for the record I’m ‘motoring to the Coast’ to stay in an Oast. And possibly make toast.
INTERVIEW: Spotlight On… Present Laughter’s Rebecca Johnson
Rebecca Johnson is an actress whose work I was already familiar with, having seen her last Christmas as Mrs Darling in Wendy and Peter Pan at the RSC in Stratford. I rated her performance, then, and she has continued to impress me now that she is starring as Liz Essendine, alongside Samuel West as Garry Essendine, in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter.
INTERVIEW: Spotlight On… Present Laughter’s Daisy Boulton
I am playing Daphne Stillington, a 24-year-old debutante, who has fallen hook, line and sinker for Garry Essendine (played by Samuel West), a hugely successful and famous theatre actor. I am really enjoying the tour – yes! Such a talented and lovely group of actors and company of creative.
MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS – West End
Fresh out of the ‘Bath’ as it were and straight into London’s West End comes the eagerly anticipated transfer of last year’s adaptation of the film Mrs Henderson Presents. Perhaps most commonly known to most as the ‘striptease revue film’ starring Judi Dench, Will Young and the late great Bob Hoskins. Mrs Laura Henderson and her girls bring us straight to the heart of an austerity Britain, with the women and the workers of World War II, providing a much more gut-wrenching hit than one might have imagined.
PRIVATE LIVES – Touring
Pleasing on the eye and ear, this 1930s Noël Coward script is brought to life for 2016 by director Tom Attenborough and a cast of five. Telling the story of two newly married divorcees who find themselves honeymooning in conjoining suites, the play follows Elyot and Amanda as they differentiate between love and marriage and perception and reality – both with each other and their new partners.
NEWS: Tom Chambers tours in Coward’s Private Lives before West End
A major revival of Noël Coward’s hilarious masterpiece, Private Lives will embark on a prior to the West End UK tour starring stage and screen stars Tom Chambers (Top Hat, Strictly Come Dancing) as the loveable and charming Elyot and Laura Rogers (Tipping The Velvet, An Ideal Husband) as the unconventional and vivacious Amanda, alongside Charlotte Ritchie (Call The Midwife, One Night in November) as Sybil and Richard Teverson (Downton Abbey) as Victor.
HAY FEVER – Duke of York’s Theatre, West End
This is a play I know extremely well. My own production (“one of the best the Nuffield Theatre has housed” – Guardian) formed part of my Theatre Studies degree at Lancaster in 1973, the year Noel Coward died. I have seen every major revival, and some dodgy tours, from the splendid Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray version which first inspired me as a teenager at the Grand Theatre Leeds, to glossy London and Chichester productions with Dame Judi, Maria Aitken, Penelope Keith, Geraldine McEwan and Diana Rigg. And the awful one with Lindsay Duncan strutting about in jodhpurs.
HAY FEVER – Duke of York’s Theatre, West End
Whenever I see this beloved play again, I wish it was my first time. It should be seen in youth – when the dread of embarrassing parents getting emotional is at its height ; and again in middle-age, to empathize with Judith Bliss’ envy of the fresher generation.
Review: Noël Coward’s Christmas Spirits (St James’s Theatre)
Richly fruited old theatricals don’t come much more Londony or patriotic than Teddington-born, Pimlico-raised Noël Coward: he even wrote our Blitz-surviving anthem ‘London Pride’. Well, apart from him being a tax exile in Switzerland and Jamaica of course, he was London through and through. Beyond a first name stemming from his December birthday, there is […]
The post Review: Noël Coward’s Christmas Spirits (St James’s Theatre) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
Review: Noël Coward’s Christmas Spirits (St James’s Theatre)
Richly fruited old theatricals don’t come much more Londony or patriotic than Teddington-born, Pimlico-raised Noël Coward: he even wrote our Blitz-surviving anthem ‘London Pride’. Well, apart from him being a tax exile in Switzerland and Jamaica of course, he was London through and through. Beyond a first name stemming from his December birthday, there is […]
The post Review: Noël Coward’s Christmas Spirits (St James’s Theatre) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
Review: Hay Fever (Theatre Royal, Brighton)
My first thoughts on seeing the audience shuffling in to the Theatre Royal Brighton for a Thursday matinee were – ‘if there’s a fire, we’re all toast: most of this lot are old enough to have known Noel Coward personally. Or his dad.’ Thoughts of age are inescapable: apart from anything else, today is leading […]
The post Review: Hay Fever (Theatre Royal, Brighton) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
Review: Hay Fever (Theatre Royal, Brighton)
My first thoughts on seeing the audience shuffling in to the Theatre Royal Brighton for a Thursday matinee were – ‘if there’s a fire, we’re all toast: most of this lot are old enough to have known Noel Coward personally. Or his dad.’ Thoughts of age are inescapable: apart from anything else, today is leading […]
The post Review: Hay Fever (Theatre Royal, Brighton) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
Noel Coward in three events: Blithe Spirit, Relative Values and Tonight at 8.30
You only have three more weeks to catch Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre. Michael Blakemore’s production – and, more specifically, Angela Lansbury’s performance in it as dotty clairvoyant Madame Arcati – is undoubtedly one of the theatre events of the year. The “eventfulness” of the occasion has little to do with the play. The […]
Review: Private Lives (The Gielgud Theatre)
What’s left to be done with or said about Private Lives? After The Importance of Being Earnest it must be the most famous comedy in the English language, it drips a heady combination of epigrams, theatrical folklore, and night sweats having been written in three days during a bout of ‘flu in a grand hotel […]
The post Review: Private Lives (The Gielgud Theatre) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
Review: Private Lives (The Gielgud Theatre)
What’s left to be done with or said about Private Lives? After The Importance of Being Earnest it must be the most famous comedy in the English language, it drips a heady combination of epigrams, theatrical folklore, and night sweats having been written in three days during a bout of ‘flu in a grand hotel […]
The post Review: Private Lives (The Gielgud Theatre) appeared first on JohnnyFox.