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Dateline: 12th November, 2008
Fifty Years of Hampstead Hampstead Theatre was started as the Hampstead Theatre Club fifty years ago when James Roose-Evans rented a scout hall behind the Everyman Cinema (itself a former leading experimental theatre in the mid-war years) in 1959. It was there, during their very first season that Roose-Evans staged the first professional Harold Pinter premiere with The Dumb Waiter and Pinter himself directed his The Room. It was rapidly established as a venue for interesting work and new writing, though its first commercial success, transferring to the West End, was Roose-Evans's revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, a 1962 production that reinvigorated interest in a writer whom many were then treating as old-dated. It is with a production of Private Lives, directed by Lucy Bailey, that Hampstead will open its 2009 season in January. It will be the first of a series of plays, one representing each decade of the theatre's history and chosen from its past successes, to commemorate its Jubilee year. In the first part of the year there will also be full productions of Alphabetical Order, an early success of Michael Frayn who is particularly linked with this theatre (its studio is named after him) that will be directed by Christopher Luscombe to represented the 1970s, and Frank McGuinness's First World War play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme represents the 1980s, with other revivals from later decades to be announced for the latter part of the year. As well as these revivals there will be readings of other plays chosen to track the theatre's history. From the 1960s there will be Dutchman by Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), a drama of black and white conflict set on a New York subway train, and Colin Spencer's comedy about a gay couple having a baby Spitting Image, which explores homophobic attitudes in 1968, when homosexuality was still criminalised. Representing the 1970s will be Alfred Fagan's Death of a Blackman which explores a black man's need to make it in a white man's world and Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, Pam Gem's funny and touching look at four women separated from their husbands or lovers. The readings from the 1980s will be Amongst Barbarians, the social comedy by Michael Wall set in the former British colony of Penang where two young Brits are arrested for heroin smuggling, and Valued Friends by Stephen Jeffreys, a satire on the property boom of that decade. Between these revivals the theatre will present two new plays, both World Premieres. The Berlin Hanover Express is the first stage play by the acclaimed television drama and film scriptwriter Ian Kennedy Martin who has set his play in the Irish delegation in Berlin in the autumn of 1942. At the launch of the season's programme Kennedy Martin said he was interested in the questions of whether you can every be entirely neutral in wartime or whether in fact neutrality involves tacit support of one side and revealed that part of the plot hinges on the fact that a cook employed in the delegation who claims to be Polish-German is in fact a Polish Jew. The other new play is Amongst Friends by April de Angelis, a comic satire on double standards which she has set in a fashionable gated community where a journalist and her ex-MP, crime-writer husband find an uninvited guest at their dinner party after the security system fails. The theatre's Creative Learning programme, which works with schools and runs the theatre's Heat & Light company for young performers, has a major production planned for the summer that will be the largest scale production ever staged by Hampstead theatre which will bring together both professional and non-professional actors from the community in a bold new play commissioned from award-winning writer Jane Bodie who is researching among local people to discover what issues, aspirations, problems and pleasures they want it to reflect. This will be presented in the main house of the theatre as part of the anniversary celebrations but the theatre is still needs to raise more funding to make this exciting ne production a reality. The second half of the year's programme will be announced in the Spring. Listings:
Howard Loxton
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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