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In this imagined inquiry into Anthony Blunt's divided life as an art expert and Soviet agent, Blunt supervises a restoration, discovers a concealed figure beneath paint, and faces questions of art, secrecy and loyalty.
A Yorkshire hospital faces closure in an NHS efficiency drive. As patients and staff struggle to keep the geriatric ward running, a documentary crew follows their campaign and the hospital choir, bringing the everyday lives of the elderly into view.
A satirical revue of sketches and musical pieces that mocks contemporary events, British authority and Shakespeare. Its material includes Peter Cook's caricature of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and music by Dudley Moore.
A son speaks with his dead father while his mother longs for a different life.
Enjoy is a British comedy play written in 1980 by Alan Bennett. An idiosyncratic view of working-class family life in Leeds, a city in the north of England, it was one of the rare theatrical flops in Bennett's career. An elderly couple living in one of the last back-to-back houses in Leeds encounter a series of jolting surprises, not least when their son returns, as a council official in drag, and reveals that the council intends to demolish their house brick by brick, and reassemble it in the local museum, complete with its occupants. Following a national tour, directed by Ronald Eyre, it opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, in London's West End on 15 October 1980, but in spite of the stellar cast of Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely, Susan Littler, Marc Sinden, Philip Sayer and Liz Smith (who replaced Joan Hickson during rehearsals), it closed on 6 December 1980. Twenty-nine years later, a new production of Enjoy toured and then moved to the Gielgud Theatre in January 2009. This time the play was described as "an astonishingly prescient, blackly comic modern classic". Starring Alison Steadman and David Troughton, it reportedly took over £1 million in advance ticket sales.
At Albion House, a British public school stages an end-of-term pageant reviewing the first half of the twentieth century. Vignettes parody literary, political and cultural figures, linked by a conversation between an MP and his family during the Second World War.
A disillusioned Member of Parliament, ten years into his second marriage, faces family frustrations, disappointed expectations, mortality and changing social norms; the comedy carries serious overtones.
In Hove, a doctor and his family, a would-be seducer, an aspiring lover, and a frustrated celibate become entangled in mistaken sexual advances, false breasts, a tranquilliser, an unexpected pregnancy, and old secrets.
In a Yorkshire suburban home, Kafka enthusiast Sydney and his wife Linda receive visits from the long-dead Franz Kafka and Max Brod. The play explores fame and reputation as Kafka’s desire for anonymity and conflict with his father emerge.
In a deteriorating Yorkshire country estate, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole resists transferring the property to the National Trust. To raise money for its upkeep, she considers selling its contents or allowing films to be shot there, proposals opposed by her more conventional sister.
Single Spies is a 1988 double bill written by the English playwright Alan Bennett. It consists of An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, the former an adaptation of a television play the author had written for the BBC in 1983. Both plays depict members of the Cambridge spy ring and touch on their moral, political and aesthetic beliefs: the first shows Guy Burgess in exile in Moscow in 1958, seven years after absconding from Britain. The second focuses on Sir Anthony Blunt while he still holds high office in the Royal Household although known to the security services as a former Soviet agent. The title comes from a speech in Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ The double bill was presented at the National Theatre in December 1988, and transferred to the Queen's Theatre in the West End in February 1989.
Talking Heads is a stage adaptation of the BBC series of the same title created by Alan Bennett. It consists of six monologues presented in alternating programmes of three each.
Actors rehearse Caliban’s Day, a fictional 1972 meeting between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Britten, composing Death in Venice, wants to discuss the opera’s troubling themes, while Auden assumes he has come for a libretto; the rehearsal’s actors and stage manager repeatedly break character to debate the play, artistic craft and the failings of its famous subjects.
The play opens in Cutlers' Grammar School, Sheffield, a fictional boys' grammar school in the north of England. Set in the mid-late 1980s, the play follows a group of history pupils preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations under the guidance of three teachers (Hector, Irwin, and Lintott) with contrasting styles. Hector, an eccentric teacher, delights in knowledge for its own sake but his ambitious headmaster wants the school to move up the academic league table and hires Irwin, a supply teacher, to introduce a rather more cynical and ruthless style of teaching. Hector is discovered sexually fondling a boy and later Irwin's latent homosexual inclinations emerge.
A fictionalized biographical study of the latter half of George III's reign, focusing on the king's struggle with mental illness and his court's inability to manage his condition.
Hilary, a former English spy living in exile in Russia, receives visits from two English couples who discuss England, friendship, art, and his life in Russia. One visitor tries to persuade him to return, and a prisoner exchange enables his departure.
In this imagined inquiry into Anthony Blunt's divided life as an art expert and Soviet agent, Blunt supervises a restoration, discovers a concealed figure beneath paint, and faces questions of art, secrecy and loyalty.
A Yorkshire hospital faces closure in an NHS efficiency drive. As patients and staff struggle to keep the geriatric ward running, a documentary crew follows their campaign and the hospital choir, bringing the everyday lives of the elderly into view.
A satirical revue of sketches and musical pieces that mocks contemporary events, British authority and Shakespeare. Its material includes Peter Cook's caricature of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and music by Dudley Moore.
A son speaks with his dead father while his mother longs for a different life.
Enjoy is a British comedy play written in 1980 by Alan Bennett. An idiosyncratic view of working-class family life in Leeds, a city in the north of England, it was one of the rare theatrical flops in Bennett's career. An elderly couple living in one of the last back-to-back houses in Leeds encounter a series of jolting surprises, not least when their son returns, as a council official in drag, and reveals that the council intends to demolish their house brick by brick, and reassemble it in the local museum, complete with its occupants. Following a national tour, directed by Ronald Eyre, it opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, in London's West End on 15 October 1980, but in spite of the stellar cast of Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely, Susan Littler, Marc Sinden, Philip Sayer and Liz Smith (who replaced Joan Hickson during rehearsals), it closed on 6 December 1980. Twenty-nine years later, a new production of Enjoy toured and then moved to the Gielgud Theatre in January 2009. This time the play was described as "an astonishingly prescient, blackly comic modern classic". Starring Alison Steadman and David Troughton, it reportedly took over £1 million in advance ticket sales.
At Albion House, a British public school stages an end-of-term pageant reviewing the first half of the twentieth century. Vignettes parody literary, political and cultural figures, linked by a conversation between an MP and his family during the Second World War.
A disillusioned Member of Parliament, ten years into his second marriage, faces family frustrations, disappointed expectations, mortality and changing social norms; the comedy carries serious overtones.
In Hove, a doctor and his family, a would-be seducer, an aspiring lover, and a frustrated celibate become entangled in mistaken sexual advances, false breasts, a tranquilliser, an unexpected pregnancy, and old secrets.
In a Yorkshire suburban home, Kafka enthusiast Sydney and his wife Linda receive visits from the long-dead Franz Kafka and Max Brod. The play explores fame and reputation as Kafka’s desire for anonymity and conflict with his father emerge.
In a deteriorating Yorkshire country estate, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole resists transferring the property to the National Trust. To raise money for its upkeep, she considers selling its contents or allowing films to be shot there, proposals opposed by her more conventional sister.
Single Spies is a 1988 double bill written by the English playwright Alan Bennett. It consists of An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, the former an adaptation of a television play the author had written for the BBC in 1983. Both plays depict members of the Cambridge spy ring and touch on their moral, political and aesthetic beliefs: the first shows Guy Burgess in exile in Moscow in 1958, seven years after absconding from Britain. The second focuses on Sir Anthony Blunt while he still holds high office in the Royal Household although known to the security services as a former Soviet agent. The title comes from a speech in Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ The double bill was presented at the National Theatre in December 1988, and transferred to the Queen's Theatre in the West End in February 1989.
Talking Heads is a stage adaptation of the BBC series of the same title created by Alan Bennett. It consists of six monologues presented in alternating programmes of three each.
Actors rehearse Caliban’s Day, a fictional 1972 meeting between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Britten, composing Death in Venice, wants to discuss the opera’s troubling themes, while Auden assumes he has come for a libretto; the rehearsal’s actors and stage manager repeatedly break character to debate the play, artistic craft and the failings of its famous subjects.
The play opens in Cutlers' Grammar School, Sheffield, a fictional boys' grammar school in the north of England. Set in the mid-late 1980s, the play follows a group of history pupils preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations under the guidance of three teachers (Hector, Irwin, and Lintott) with contrasting styles. Hector, an eccentric teacher, delights in knowledge for its own sake but his ambitious headmaster wants the school to move up the academic league table and hires Irwin, a supply teacher, to introduce a rather more cynical and ruthless style of teaching. Hector is discovered sexually fondling a boy and later Irwin's latent homosexual inclinations emerge.
A fictionalized biographical study of the latter half of George III's reign, focusing on the king's struggle with mental illness and his court's inability to manage his condition.
Hilary, a former English spy living in exile in Russia, receives visits from two English couples who discuss England, friendship, art, and his life in Russia. One visitor tries to persuade him to return, and a prisoner exchange enables his departure.