What is a play? A message to the future, a fart in your face or a pain in the arse?
What is a play? A message to the future, a fart in your face or a pain in the arse? Just a few of the suggestions that the writer clients of agent Peggy Ramsay offer up when a young ingenue asks that fatal question in her office one otherwise ordi…
Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On is a curious play. His first outing as playwright (back in 1968) is charmingly eccentric, wonderfully witty and every bit a Bennett play. In fact it comes across as if the History Boys stumbled into a production of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ and decided to join in the fun.
I am inordinately fond of Forty Years On. In only my second ever trip to London, my mother took me to see the original production the year I was fifteen and therefore readily able to identify with the serge-trousered schoolboys it features in their end-of-term entertainment to mark the retirement of a long-serving headmaster.
Further casting has been announced for the opening productions of Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2017 season, FORTY YEARS ON and CAROLINE, OR CHANGE.
Daniel Evans and Rachel Tackley announce Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2017 summer festival season – the first under their leadership as Artistic Director and Executive Director. Highlights include: Chichester’s Festival 2017 embraces classic and contemporary plays and musicals, with headline actors including Sharon D. Clarke, Omid Djalili, Marcia Gay Harden, Ian McKellen, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Brian J. Smith and Richard Wilson New …
Fracking is something of a contentious subject in West Sussex, so where better to stage Alistair Beaton’s new comedy Fracked! (or: Please don’t use the word). Littered with references to very recent events (including Boris Johnson and Southern trains) you can’t help but feel the playwright is hidden in the theatre somewhere
The Beeb wheeled out Peter Capaldi for its launch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream due to air on BBC1 at the end of May. Not because he’s in it but because the entire play, adapted to an ‘accessible’ 90 minutes by Who’s reinventor Russell T Davies and filmed with the special effects team at Roath Lock in Cardiff where Dr Who is made, it’s fashioned specifically for Whovian fans.
The Beeb wheeled out Peter Capaldi for its launch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream due to air on BBC1 at the end of May. Not because he’s in it but because the entire play, adapted to an ‘accessible’ 90 minutes by Who’s reinventor Russell T Davies and filmed with the special effects team at Roath Lock in Cardiff where Dr Who is made, it’s fashioned specifically for Whovian fans.
Earlier this week, Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey, now 82, came out officially as gay. And in today’s Observer, Richard Wilson, aged 78, tells The Observer about his own public coming out two years ago: “I was officially “outed” by Time Out a couple of years ago.
