Philip Bretherton is to appear in Tony’s Last Tape, based on the diaries of Tony Benn, which is to have a short run at Nottingham Playhouse.
The Labour MP Tony Benn was one of Britain’s most respected, divisive and celebrated politicians.
Andy Barrett’s new play examines the struggle of an old man who realises that maybe it is time to withdraw from the fight, to let others take over—but he does not quite know how.
He sits in a room faced with a collection of recording devices that he has collected over his long and eventful life. He opens a drawer, takes out a pipe, unscrews his flask and pours himself the first cup of tea of the day.
For more than 50 years he has been recording everything that has happened to and around him. As the years have passed the burden of this documentation has grown. Now he has decided to make his last tape.
Andy Barrett’s long-standing relationship with Nottingham Playhouse has included productions such as The Day that Kevin Came in 2003 about Kevin Costner allegedly visiting the East Midlands to star in a film about the poet Lord Byron, Garage Band, a comedy about the punk movement, in 2009, a new version of Ibsen’s The League of Youth in 2011 which featured Philip Bretherton as Bratsberg and the 2014 touring production of The Second Minute, the tale of a soldier’s life in World War I.
Bretherton also appeared at Nottingham Playhouse in 2008 in Stephen Poliakoff’s Breaking the Silence, a play about a family in post-Revolution Russia travelling across the country in a dilapidated railway carriage.
Directed by Nottingham Playhouse artistic director Giles Croft with design by Rachael Jacks, Tony’s Last Tape will be performed in the Neville Studio from Wednesday until Saturday.