Autumn at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic kicks off with Brendan Murray’s “heart-warmingly funny” Seeing the Lights.
The play follows a fractious family arranging a rare get-together for their mum’s birthday. Long-suffering Terry is a nurse by day and live-in dogsbody for his mum by night. As her birthday approaches, all she wants is for the whole family to see Blackpool lights again—for old times’ sake.
But sister Marion finds fault with everything, blue-eyed boy Kenneth still hasn’t arrived and Terry is at the end of his tether. When fate intervenes, can they all forgive and forget to make sure mum gets her special present?
Returning to the Staffordshire theatre-in-the-round are Anna Kirke who played Mrs Wilberforce in Graham Linehan’s adaptation of William Rose’s screenplay of The Ladykillers in 2015, and Connie Walker who was in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls in 2000.
The cast also features Oliver Gatz, Karl Haynes and George Potts who played pastry chef and poetry lover Ragueneau and aristocrat De Guiche in Royal and Derngate, Northampton and Northern Stage’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac in 2015.
Director Peter Leslie Wild is also returning to the New Vic after being at the helm of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s Inherit the Wind in 2014 and Philip Goulding’s A Fine Bright Day Today in 2012.
Seeing the Lights runs at the New Vic from Friday 18 September until Saturday 3 October.