Through a Dark GlasslyHannie Rayson’s play, like the enormously popular adaptation of A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life that played to over 30,000 people back in 1984, is one of those plays about the Great War told through the eyes of an ‘everyman’ rather than an official hero. In this case it is told through eyes that were clouded for half a century.Nelson Ferguson was a promising artist who served on the Western Front. Mustard gas robbed him of his full sight but he struggled on, raising a family and making a career in art none the less.Rayson adapts his ...
Archives for “Ben Geurens”
School Daze?Alan Bennett's first play was a self styled revue called Forty Years On unrolling the history of post-war Britain with singing schoolboys and doting dons. This time Bennett's boys recount the downfall of one dear and queer old teacher Hector and the rise to power of another less popular but no less queer Irwin.Underneath the surface story is Bennett’s view of Post-Thatcher Britain. Even Thatcher’s most memorable saying “There is No Such Thing as Society” is parodied on the blackboard when the play opens.In 1983 a group of boys, fresh from their A-Levels (something akin to the VCE) have ...
Sloane Square!In this new production, the first professional staging in years, poor old Joe Orton gets a battering almost as bad as the one his psycho boyfriend gave him back in 1967. Entertaining Mr Sloane was Orton's first staged play and one of the greatest English sex comedies since the Restoration. In Orton’s words “it’s about a young man who wants a room and comes into this house. He’s met the woman of the house in a public library and she shows him around the house. Within about five minutes she attempts to seduce him. A bit later on, she ...
