January: A taste of Honey

Hello Ladies

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2020!  I hope you all had a very happy Festive Period and that this year will be good to you.  Personally I'm very happy to see the back of 2019!  THANK YOU for putting up with the cancellations and changes of plan.  

Part of the fall out of 2019 continues, in that I am organising regular trips to the UK to see my Mum, and this will unfortunately affect some of our dates.  I have not filled in the whole year, but here are the dates that I can do in 2020 so far ... unfortunately this does mean that it will not always be the first Wednesday of the month, and may still be subject to change - I hope that you can bear with me:

8th January

5th February

4th March

8th April ** 2nd Weds

6th May *

3rd June *

* Possibly might change

I am sorry about having to cancel December, and I am holding the missed play over until December 2020 as it is an ideal Christmas play.  

Therefore we are starting 2020 off with a play that I have 'oven ready' (groan ... and apologies) although it's not a bright and fun start to the year. However, it should be good.  We have read Shelagh Delaney before, The Memory of Water, which we greatly enjoyed.

A Taste of Honey is Shelagh Delaney's first play, written when she was 19. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalise British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented. 

The play was first produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and was premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a small fringe theatre in London, on 27 May 1958, and was adapted into a film in 1961 starring Rita Tusshingham and Dora Bryan.

A Taste of Honey is set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. Jo, a seventeen-year-old working class girl, lives with her mother, Helen, who leaves Jo alone in their new flat after she begins a relationship with Peter, a rich lover who is younger than her. At the same time Jo begins a romantic relationship with Jimmy, a black sailor. 

Characters

• Helen: A hardened, working class single mother and alcoholic.

• Josephine:  Helen's teenage daughter, known as 'Jo', raised solely by Helen.

• Peter: Helen's younger, wealthy boyfriend from London.

• The Boy: Also known as Jimmy, a black sailor. 

• Geoffrey: An art student in his early twenties who becomes Jo's roommate and friend.

4 December - Life and Beth

Allelujah!  In November we finally managed to read Allelujah!   However, I am wondering if it was worth the effort and stress of reading a play with sooooo many characters, and I will try very hard to rein in my flights of fancy and stick to smaller casts!

For December I luckily stumbled across an Ayckbourn Christmas play.  It being Ayckbourn it's not exactly a pantomime!

Life and Beth is a 2008 play by Alan Ayckbourn. It was written as a third part of a trilogy named Things That Go Bump, uniting the cast of the first two plays: Haunting Julia (1994) and Snake in the Grass (2002) which we recently read. It is about a recently bereaved widow, Beth, troubled by her family’s misguided support and a late husband who won’t leave her alone.  Ayckbourn considered it his equivalent to Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (which we've also read!).

This the first play to be written since Alan Ayckbourn’s stroke in 2006. After the stroke, he doubted if he could return to writing, at some points considering giving it up and just directing. 

It is Christmas, and the play begins with recently bereaved Beth and her sister-in-law, Connie, sitting watching carols on television. Connie, in a one-sided conversation, praises her late brother, Gordon. Although Beth quietly agrees with Connie’s idea of her idyllic marriage to Gordon, she expresses subtle annoyance with Connie’s idea that the whole family will have to look after her this first Christmas alone, and Connie’s hints of self-pity don’t help either. Beth is more concerned about the disappearance of her cat, Wagstaff, who disappeared on the day of the funeral.

Characters: 

·         Beth, a recently bereaved widow, very much subservient to her husband during their marriage but now living her own life

·         Gordon, Beth’s late overbearing and pedantic husband, formerly a Health & Safety officer

·         Connie, Gordon’s alcoholic sister, marginalised by her family in favour of her brother

·         David, the local vicar

·         Martin, Gordon and Beth’s son, well-meaning but inheriting all of the wrong attributes of Gordon

·         Ella, Martin’s new girlfriend, overpowered by Martin’s misplaced affection

The original play starred some familiar names to some of us: Lisa Goddard & Susie Blake.

6 November: Allelujah! or A Taste of Honey

In October, because we really do  need 10 people to read Allelujah!, we read Travels with my Aunt, which was a much easier read and fun!

In November I again propose Allelujah! (see October for more details).  We read it with the ECC group and it was incredibly complicated to allocate parts even though there were more than 10 of us!  But the group enjoyed it and I'm sure you will.  But, advance warning, it is almost IMPOSSIBLE for me to judge how many lines any person is given at any time ... so PLEASE bear with me if the allocation seems unequal, it really REALLY isn't personal!  It's just REALLY hard to work out!  


The alternative option is  A Taste of Honey if we are fewer than 10!

A Taste of Honey is Shelagh Delaney's first play, written when she was 19. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalise British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented. 

The play was first produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and was premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a small fringe theatre in London, on 27 May 1958, and was adapted into a film in 1961 starring Rita Tusshingham and Dora Bryan.

A Taste of Honey is set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. Jo, a seventeen-year-old working class girl, lives with her mother, Helen, who leaves Jo alone in their new flat after she begins a relationship with Peter, a rich lover who is younger than her. At the same time Jo begins a romantic relationship with Jimmy, a black sailor. He proposes marriage but then goes to sea, leaving Jo pregnant and alone.

Characters

• Helen: A hardened, working class single mother and alcoholic.
• Josephine:  Helen's teenage daughter, known as 'Jo', raised solely by Helen.
• Peter: Helen's younger, wealthy boyfriend from London.
• The Boy: Also known as Jimmy, a black sailor. Jo falls in love with him and becomes pregnant.
• Geoffrey: An art student in his early twenties who becomes Jo's roommate and friend.

2 October - Alleujah! or Travels with my Aunt

Allelujah! is Alan Bennett's new play which opened in London last year.  Unfortunately it has a cast of thousands (well, 25) which has made it difficult to prepare for the group.  Therefore, I hope you'll bear with me: if there are 10 of us then we'll do Allelujah!  If there are less then we'll read Travels with my Aunt.

Allelujah! by Alan Bennett

Allelujah! is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department in Whitehall. Meanwhile, a TV crew has found evidence that a staff member is murdering elderly patients to create vacant beds for new arrivals. 

In reality Allelujah! is a musical and not strictly politically accurate: the latter I'm going to ignore and the former will also be mentioned but we will not be singing and I will not be choreographing dance routines!

Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene, adapted for the stage by Giles Havergal

Not just a play - also a film starring Maggie Smith.

While attending the cremation of his mother's remains, London bank manager Henry Pulling meets eccentric Augusta Bertram, a woman who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth, is waiting for her. Shortly after she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti, with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000.

Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom ... and I will not spoil it for  you by saying any more!

4 September - Gas Light

Firstly, I'm glad you all enjoyed the Alan Ayckbourn in August, even if the ending was a bit unclear.  I've done some Googling and maybe reading the Wikipedia summary will help:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_in_the_Grass#Synopsis  My feeling is that Miriam dies ... it would be justice!  But it is rather open-ended maybe.  I do hope you enjoyed it, I liked that it was a slightly different Ayckbourn!


Also, for those of you who appreciated the fig cake, here's a link!  https://www.mattersofthebelly.com/ottolenghis-fig-almond-cake/

And so to September ...  Gas Light

This classic 1938 thriller (and its film adaptations) gave rise to the term “gaslighting”, meaning a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making them doubt their own memory and perception.  It's a theme that is very pertinent today, as we become more aware of psychologically abusive relationships.

The play is set in fog-bound London in 1880, at the upper middle class home of Jack Manningham and his wife Bella. It is late afternoon, a time that Hamilton notes as the time “before the feeble dawn of gaslight and tea.”   Bella is clearly on edge, and the stern reproaches of her overbearing husband make matters worse. What most perturbs Bella is Jack’s unexplained disappearances from the house: he will not tell her where he is going, and this increases her anxiety. 


Characters

Mr. Manningham: Husband

Mrs. Manningham:  Wife

Elizabeth:  Housekeeper

Nancy:  Younger maid

Rough:  Ex-Detective

Because this is a thriller I do not want to give too much away!!  So I'll just put up some pictures!  These are all from the 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman.

7 August - Snake in the Grass

Incredibly it's nearly two years since we last did an Alan Ayckbourn!  And the good news is that in selecting this play I also found another play that we can do at Christmas!

Written in 2002, Snake in the Grass is a ghost story about a middle-aged older sister who returns to the family home where her younger sister still lives, shortly after their abusive father's death. All is not as it seems!!

Characters

• Annabel Chester, fifty, was a successful married business woman, now divorced and her business collapsed

• Miriam Chester, forty-four, Annabel's younger sister, eternally house-bound to her late father's house

• Alice Moody, nurse for Annabel and Miriam's father shortly before his death 

3 July: A Bunch of Amateurs

I thought we should have a bit of fun, so I do hope that this proves to be funny - it should be for anyone vaguely connected with 'Am Dram'!

A Bunch of Amateurs is a 2008 play written by Ian Hislop, of Private Eye and Have I Got News for You fame, and Nick Newman who has written for several satirical magazines and television and radio programmes.

Unfortunately, and despite an all star cast, according to Wikipedia, the film was universally panned by both critics and audiences alike.  However I have managed to find a couple of good reviews!  And the critics are not always right - are they!

"Terrific comedy packed with killer comic dialogue... plenty of twists and turns."

WhatsOnStage

"Deliciously stuffed with Shakespeare... a laugh-a-minute."

Mail on Sunday

A Bunch of Amateurs

Keen to boost his flagging career, fading Hollywood action hero Jefferson Steele arrives in England to play King Lear in Stratford – only to find that this is not the birthplace of the Bard, but a sleepy Suffolk village. And instead of Kenneth Branagh and Dame Judi Dench, the cast are a bunch of amateurs trying to save their theatre from developers. Jefferson’s monstrous ego, vanity and insecurity are tested to the limit by the enthusiastic am-dram thespians. As acting worlds collide and Jefferson’s career implodes, he discovers some truths about himself – along with his inner Lear!

Characters

JEFFERSON STEELE - A fading Hollywood star who is arrogant, insecure, brash, gauche, demanding, vulnerable and ultimately aware of his own absurdity.  (Burt Reynolds)

DOROTHY NETTLE - Director of the Stratford Players and the moving force behind keeping the theatre alive. Her sweet and accommodating manner conceals her inner steel. (Samantha Bond)

JESSICA STEELE - Jefferson's teenage daughter, who has been neglected by her Hollywood star father and now wants to make him pay for it.

NIGEL DEWBURY - Solicitor and leading light of the Stratford Players. Pompous, stuck-up and self-regarding, he believes he is the star of the show, and should play all the leading roles. He also fancies his romantic chances with Dorothy. (Derek Jacobi)

MARY PLUNKETT - Owner of the Rectory bed and breakfast. Jolly, generous and an unashamedly adoring Jefferson Steele fan -- although somewhat confused about which roles he played in his films, and how keen he is on her. (Imelda Staunton)

DENIS DOBBINS - Handyman and village Mr. Fixit. Avuncular though slightly dull, Denis is star-struck by Jefferson and fancies heading up his entourage of one.

LAUREN BELL - Thirty-something marketing executive former physiotherapist and the sponsor's wife. Passionate about the arts and smarter than her husband allows her to be, she's treated as a bimbo because of her looks.

The Film

Nick Newman & Ian Hislop