CityLife

Library Theatre: New season 2010

Bob Golding's Morecambe arrives in April 2010

THE announcement of a new Library Theatre Company season is always a bit of an event, but their next is made even more notable by the fact that it will be their last in their current home, probably forever but at least for some considerable time.

“What we really wanted to do in this season was to reflect the strengths of the company over the years but also to invite back actors who have been a prominent part of the company during our years in our current home,” says artistic director Chris Honer.

First up in this momentous season is Neil Simon’s comedy I Ought To Be In Pictures, replacing the Border Crossings Trilogy the theatre were originally planning to mount in this time slot.

Directed by Paul Jepson and running from February 11 to 27, this touching, poignant, and typically funny Neil Simon drama centres on down-on-his luck Hollywood screenwriter Herbert Tucker.

Struggling with writer’s block, his career is on the skids. One day, his daughter Libby, an aspiring New York actress who he abandoned nearly 20 years previously, turns up unannounced at his front door.

His conscience pricked by Libby’s out-of-the-blue appearance, Herbert thinks he can make her dreams of cinematic stardom become reality.

Libby, meanwhile, thinks she can return the favour by getting her dad back together with Steffy, his long-suffering on-off girlfriend.

“A Neil Simon play we’ve never done!” laughs Chris.

“But of course, Neil Simon and his plays go back a long way with the Library Theatre Company and this quite joyful American Jewish comedy makes for a nice contrast to our next production, David Mamet’s gritty masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, which is in its own way an exhilirating, if terrifying, picture of American men at their most desperate.

“We’ve been trying to get the rights to do it for years,” reveals Chris, who’ll be directing this classic himself (his production of Mamet’s Speed-The-Plow was nominated for Best Production in the 2006 Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards) from March 12 to April 3.

The production, starring David Fleeshman – a long-time associate of the Library – follows four desperate Chicago real estate salesmen in a brutal situation where the month’s top guy wins a gleaming Cadillac, while the runner-up takes home a set of steak knives and the rest get the sack.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross is a sizzling drama of hard-driven men on the edge and at the edge. Admire their know-how and their slickness! Wonder at their dream-selling and their hokum! Be appalled by their double-dealing and chicanery!

Be warned that the production features not only ear-blisteringly strong language but – shock! – smoking on stage.

It is complemented by a little-known Mamet piece Mr Happiness, an ironic short drama set in a New York radio station in 1934.

Directed by Katie Lewis – who is resident assistant director at the Library Theatre as part of the MFA in Theatre directing at Birkbeck College, University of London – it is performed at 6pm on March 31 to April 2.

Growing out of its success at this year’s Re:Play Festival, says Chris, “we’re going to be giving Cathy Crabb’s play Beautiful House a new production.

“We’re putting in a bit more in the way of resources after seeing it at both Studio Salford and here at Re:Play.”

Directed by Noreen Kershaw, and running from April 22 to May 8, this wry tale of love and belongings, relics and regrets, and trinkets and tombs, is both heartbreaking and achingly funny.

So that their seriously ill daughter can spend what might be her last months in her childhood home, Ronnie and Bridgette have vacated their dream house in Delph for a Salford tower block. And at first they think Otis and Paula, in the flat below, are the neighbours from hell.

Topping off the season from June 5 to July 3 is Chris’ production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest.

This “trivial play for serious people” – as Wilde himself dubbed it – was the first ever production in the Library Theatre back in November 1952. So its revival to mark the company’s final production in its present home feels entirely apt.

“Obviously it’s a play that’s been seen quite a lot,” Chris admits, “but we’re hoping to bring something fresh to it.

“It also feels right because of its importance in the Library Theatre Company’s history and it’s being staged at an appropriate time of the year.”

Along with their own productions, the season also boasts what Chris modestly calls “quite a rich range of other material”, starting with the Out Of Joint production of Andersen’s English, written by by Sebastian Barry and directed by Max Stafford-Clark from March 2 to 6.

Celebrated children’s writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad’s Hill Place in the Kent marshes – home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family.

To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens’s household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn’t at first see the storms brewing within the family: undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens’s marriage.

The cast includes Niamh Cusack as Catherine, Charles Dickens’ wife; David Rintoul as Charles Dickens; and Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen.

There’s also Bob Golding’s fairly remarkable Morecambe, his one-man play about Eric Morecambe (April 15 to 17), as well as the return of the Norfox Young People’s Theatre Company in A Little Voice A Long Way From Here, written and directed by Liz Postlethwaite (April 9 and 10), while David Benson Sings Noel Coward, with piano accompaniment by Stewart Nicholls, arrives on March 21.

By popular demand, Lip Service’s MEN Theatre Award-nominated Desperate To Be Doris is also back (May 11 to 15).

It features a specially recruited 50-strong choir singing Doris Day classics such as Que Sera Sera, The Deadwood Stage, and Secret Love as it tells the story of Dean (Bolton-born Darren Southworth, direct from the West End’s Spamalot), by day a buyer at a mail-order nightwear firm. By night, he sings like the great Doris Day. But when his local operatic society, Out Of My Range, stages a production of Calamity Jane, will he come alive?

Celebrating 25 years of LipService lunacy, there’s also LipService Best Bits on June 20, a comedy confection of the best bits of LipService – from Withering Looks, Women on the Verger, Very Little Women, King Arthur And The Knights Of The Occasional Table, film clips from B-Road Movie and Horror For Wimps, and even some very early stand up. Who remembers Girls In Orbit, or Mavis The Period from their first cabaret show, Coming On Late?

Look out too for a very special evening on July 4, celebrating the life of the Library Theatre Company at the Library. It is directed by Roger Haines, who has been awarded the MEN Theatre Awards Horniman Award for unique contribution to theatre.