Stage
A thin section, this! I’ve never regretted not writing for tv, but I do think I should have tried harder to get something on stage. But when? And how? The biggest opportunity came when Samuel West was in charge of the theatres at Sheffield, and actually commissioned a play. But then his theatres went dark for some reason and the moment passed.
So the stage pieces listed here were very small productions – two at Edinburgh, and two at the Charleston Festival. The most likely to amount to anything was Hell’s Bells. It got good reviews in Edinburgh and I still think the idea was a good one – the cast of a terrible old TV costume drama coming together to make an audio commentary for a DVD – although audience reaction suggested that the phenomenon of the audio commentary isn’t quite as universally known as I thought it was.
For Edinburgh
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Director Simon Scullion approached me about turning my creepy short story into a half-hour theatre piece for Edinburgh. He did most of the work of selling it to the Pleasance and directing Martin Miller’s performance.
It was described by The Scotsman as like “The Ring with a Radio 4 accent”, which I considered fair. They also said it was “short, sharp and high-concept” and rightly praised Martin’s performance. When I finally got to see it, I was actually scared, which was all to his credit.
Director Simon Scullion
Performer Martin Miller
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Our follow-up to Proceedings was a 45-minute play adapted (as before) from an existing radio piece. In this case it was Mrs Milliner, from the comedy Time for Mrs Milliner.
This three-hander was set in a radio facility, where an audio commentary for the old TV series Mrs Milliner will be recorded. Its star turns up but finds that other cast members – and the producer – have already had a row and walked off. The only other people present are the show’s original writer (who now runs a kennels in Shropshire) and a camp man delivering some of the show’s original hats. In the end, the delivery man (an expert on hats) is roped in to the commentary, and drives the others mad. “It’s not about hats! It was never about hats!”
The Times reviewer Libby Purvis warned: “Real hats do get harmed in this show”.
Director Simon Scullion
Cast Janet Ellis, Gina Beck and Martin Miller
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For the Charleston Festival in May 2009, I was asked to take Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater and sort-of collaborate with it. The result was still pretty dodgy (Eileen Atkins has encouragingly described it as a “bad, bad play”), but it was supposed to represent the sort of fun had by Bloomsberries-at-Home when they staged this for their friends in the 1930s. It certainly entertained the festival audience, anyway.
The setting of the play is of course very similar to my book Tennyson’s Gift, which I had written in 1995 without daring to glance at Woolf’s play. But now I immersed myself in the play’s two versions and came up with this script. It wouldn’t work anywhere but Charleston! Many cheers to the cast for pulling it off.
Director Jonathan Munby
Cast Prunella Scales, Hugh Ross, Eileen Atkins, Timothy West, Sam West, Lucy Briggs Owen, Martin Hutson and Dorothea Myer Bennett
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Charleston Festival’s director asked me to come up with a project for Eileen Atkins for the 2013 “Gala Night”. Eileen Atkins was a great supporter of the festival, and of course a huge draw. After a bit of thinking, I came up with Ellen Terry’s lectures on Shakespeare, a book of which had been given to me by kind book-shop-owning friends a few years before.
We all looked into the lectures, which had been given originally by Terry following her retirement from the stage. They gave her an opportunity to be thoughtful and instructive, but also to act some of her favourite scenes. Under the Lyceum regime of Henry Irving, she had never been able to play Rosalind, because Irving didn’t fancy any of the male roles in As You Like It. Now she could redress this injustice.
What I overlooked while working on the lecture parts for Eileen was how powerful and convincing she would be in every Shakespeare role from Juliet to Lady Macbeth. It was a stunning performance, and she went on to repeat it at The Globe and elsewhere.
For Charleston Festival
Scrap Book - Stage
The flier handed out by the tireless cast
The silhouette of the little dog looks very much like my beloved Hoagy
Very nice review from Libby Purves in The Times
My pass for the Pleasance