AMBER LANE PRESS - Key Persons
CHARLES DYER was born in Shrewsbury and began his career in the theatre at the age of 15, working as a call-boy at the Hulme Hippodrome in Manchester. He started writing while still a young actor and achieved his first major breakthrough in 1956 with Wanted - One Body, a play that is still regularly performed all over the world . His reputation as a dramatist was established in the 1960s with two plays: Rattle of a Simple Man and Staircase, both of which were made into successful films. A new production of Rattle of a Simple Man opened at the Comedy Theatre, London in May 2004.
EIVOR MARTINUS is a playwright, novelist, translator, and theatre director. She has adapted several Swedish classics for BBC Radio and has translated fifteen of Strindberg's plays into English for stage productions in London and New York, including The Father, Lady Julie, The Ghost Sonata, and The Great Highway. Four of her own plays have been produced in England and the USA and she has also translated and adapted plays by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Stephen Lowe and Caryl Churchill for theatres in Sweden. She has received awards for her work from the Swedish Writers' Union, the Swedish Academy, and the British Comparative Literature Association.
FIDELIS MORGAN has written three plays and over a dozen books, including non-fiction and who-dun-its, which reflect her particular interest in Restoration theatre. She has had many acting roles on television but her major achievement has been on the stage and she as on The Observer list of Seven Best Actresses of the Year for her work at Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Fidelis has appeared in classic plays from Massinger and Fletcher to Bertolt Brecht, Coward, Shaw, Lorca, Wilde, Genet, and Joe Orton, playing everything from monarchs (Queen Elizabeth I in Schiller's Mary Stuart) to prostitutes (Metella in Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne - translated as French Knickers).
Frank Barber, born in Jamaica, a slave and the child of slaves, was brought to England by a serving officer at the end of his tour of duty, and at the age of about seven became a servant in the strange household of Dr Samuel Johnson. Frank remained in Johnson's service until Johnson died thirty-two years later, when he became the chief - indeed, almost the only - beneficiary of Johnson's will. Their relationship, which began as that of employer and servant, and also protector and protégé (Johnson hated the slave trade), evolved through the years into something like that of father and son - though Frank was like most sons in having spells of rebellion. This play takes the handful of hard facts we know about Frank and supplies, imaginatively, the background of motive and feeling. First heard on BBC Radio 4 in 1982, directed by Jane Morgan. (Cast 7+m, 5f)
Job Titles:
- Director
- Director of the Citizen 's Theatre Glasgow
GILES HAVERGAL has been a director of the Citizen's Theatre Glasgow since 1969. He has directed scores of plays both here and in North America and has acted in several. He has also adapted classic novels for the stage. He won the New York Drama Desk Award, 1995 and the Olivier Award, 1992, for Travels with my Aunt. He received a CBE in 2001 and an Honorary Masters in Fine Arts at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 2003.
Speech therapist James Leeds tries to persuade Sarah Norman, who is deaf, to learn to speak and lip-read. But it is Sarah who teaches James the beauty and subtlety of her sign-language and shows him that she has a right to an independent existence that defies the norms and expectations of the hearing world. Winner of the Antoinette Perry (Tony) award for ‘Best Play of the 1979-80 Broadway Season' and The Society of West End Theatre Awards for ‘The Play of the Year 1981'.
JOHN WAIN (1925 -1994) was a journalist, critic and Professor of Poetry. He was known as one of the so-called 'angry young men' - a group of radical writers in 1950s Britain which included John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse. He was also associated with post-war poets such as Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn. He wrote fifteen novels including Young shoulders (which won the 1982 Whitbread Prize) as well as literary studies of such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Arnold Bennett. He also wrote numerous poems, and three plays - Johnson is leaving (1973), Harry in the night (1975) and Frank (1984).
MARK MEDOFF is a playwright, screenwriter, actor and director. He started writing when he was an English professor at New Mexico State University. He was appointed the university's dramatist-in-residence following the production of his first play When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?. His breakthrough came with Children of a Lesser God (1980) which won him a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination for the film version six years later. His subsequent screenplays include Clara's Heart (1988) and City of Joy (1992), and he has appeared in several films. In 2002 he directed the film Children on Their Birthdays based on the short story by Truman Capote. Mark Medoff's latest drama Prymate, opened on Broadway in May 2004.
MARTIN SHERMAN is an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged in over 50 countries. He was born in Philadelphia and now lives in London. His theatre works include Next Year in Jerusalem, Messiah, Some Sunny Day, When She Danced, A Madhouse in Goa and the award-winning Bent which has been produced in 35 countries including as a ballet in Brazil. His screenplays include The Summer House, Bent, Alive and Kicking, Callas Forever and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. His show The Boy From Oz (about, and with music by, the late Peter Allen) opened on Broadway in October 2003.
MICHAEL BURRELL works regularly all over the world as an actor and director. He has played leading roles for most of Britain's major companies. He has won several awards for both the stage and screen versions of his play Hess, which was first presented at the Young Vic Theatre in 1978. His other work for the stage includes: The Man Who Lost America, My Sister Next Door, an adaptation of Love Among the Butterflies, and ‘Burrell on the Bard'. He has appeared in more than 20 films and numerous television programmes including Kavanagh QC and EastEnders. Michael Burrell has been Associate Director of the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, of Derby Playhouse, and until recently was Director of the Angles Theatre, Wisbech.
NELL DUNN is a playwright and a novelist. Her first book was Up the Junction, published in 1963, and she worked with Ken Loach to turn it into a 'Wednesday Play' for the BBC. She collaborated with him again on the film version of her second novel, Poor Cow, which he directed in 1967. In 1981 she wrote her first play, Steaming, which ran in the West End for two years.
Rudolf Hess, close friend and deputy to Hitler as leader of the Nazi Party, flew to Scotland in 1941, at the height of the war, on a self-appointed mission of peace. He was immediately imprisoned and was later convicted at Nuremberg on charges of ‘Conspiracy for war' and ‘Crimes against peace'. He was given a life sentence. In this dramatic monologue Hess supposes what he might say, given the opportunity, about himself and the world as he sees it after nearly 40 years of imprisonment in Spandau gaol. First presented at the Young Vic Theatre in 1978. (Cast 1m)
"In Burrell's ingenious script Hess is many things, all provocative: a memoir of a madman, a study of political fanaticism, a treatise on justice, a portrait of old age, an analysis of penal confinement, a decent into hell."
Cairo, 1942. As war rages in the desert, cultures collide in the city and six individuals struggle to come to terms with love, lust and fate in an alien country. In a melange of Mozart, Carmen Miranda, Vera Lynn, Dixieland and cries from the minarets as the muezzins call the men to prayer, this witty and audacious play inhabits a world where everyone has something to hide and anyone may be a spy. Some Sunny Day was first presented at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in 1996, with Rupert Everett and Corin Redgrave. (Cast 4m, 2f)
TONY MARCHANT is best known for his play about the Falklands War, Welcome Home, which, after a national tour by Paines Plough, was presented at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1983. He has worked closely with the Theatre Royal, Stratford East: Remember Me? (1980); Thick as Thieves (1981); The Lucky Ones (1982); Lazydays Ltd (1984) and at the Soho Poly Theatre: Stiff (1982); Raspberry (1982). His stage play Speculators was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Pit in 1987. He was the winner of DRAMA Magazine's ‘Most Promising Playwright' award in 1982 and won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival in the same year for Raspberry. His work for television includes Reservations, Moneymen, Death of a Son, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment and an episode of The Canterbury Tales (2003).