Trevor Nunn’s INHERIT THE WIND featured Kevin Spacey as Henry Drummond and David Troughton as Matthew Harrison – two legal titans confronting each other with freedom of thought on trial. It’s based on the 1925 ‘Monkey’ trial when science teacher John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee State law by teaching Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Staged at London’s Old Vic, Kevin and David kindly blue-biroed my black biro sketch in the autumn of 2009.
Eve Best and Charles Edwards played the perfect Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s 1599 comedic play Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe in mid 2011, signing my quick biro sketch with a thin red fineliner
Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn is currently in season at the Hampstead Theatre, directed by Peter DuBois. After University, Catherine and Gwen chose opposite paths. Catherine becomes a high flying academic and author, while Gwen builds a home with a husband and children. Decades later, each woman covets the other’s life. It’s a dissection of modern gender politics in a virtuosic comedy. It received four stars from The Times, Evening Standard, Telegraph, Independent and Time Out. Emilia Fox and Emma Fielding play Catherine and Gwen respectively. Both signed the drawing at the theatre last. The play continues until 22 February 2014.
The inaugural season of work for the Michael Grandage Company at the Noel Coward Theatre comprising of five productions ended with the final performance of Henry V, starring Jude Law as the national hero, come war criminal monarch.
After a pioneering 15 month season, the star-studded team played to 390,000 people, with a quarter of the tickets sold for £10. At the heart of the Company’s philosophy was to offer affordable seats to attract a new generation of fans. A third were bought by first time theatre goers.
Jude was the last big draw, in a season that included Simon Russell Beale, Dame Judi Dench, Ben Whishaw, Sheridan Smith and David Walliams. On the final night he and Jessie Buckley (Princess Katharine) signed my sketch.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda – The Musical won a record seven Olivier Awards in 2012, including Best Actor in a Musical for Bertie Carvel, playing the hammer-throwing schoolmarm Miss Trunchbull.
After a 12 week stint at Stratford-Upon-Avon, Matilda transferred to the Cambridge Theatre in the West End in November 2011.
He reprised the role on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre, earning a Tony nomination. Bertie performed 650 show-stealing turns as the despot with a colossal bosom and hunchback who lived by the motto: Bambinatum est maggitum (children are maggots)
A Delicate Balance won Edward Albee his first Pulitzer Prize in 1967, followed by the more commercially successful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Almeida Theatre’s revival in the summer of 2011 featured Imelda Staunton as the drunken Sister Claire – “Vodka? Sunday? Ten-to-eight? Well, why the hell not.”
This ‘country comedy’ explores the “secret terror that lurks beneath the bland routines of bourgeois life.” Imelda’s performance, as usual, attracted rave reviews. She signed my sketch at the final matinee on the 2nd of July.
My sketch of Imelda in Sweeney Todd is here.
Danielle Hope won the BBC talent quest Over the Rainbow and with it the part of Dorothy in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of The Wizard of Oz, which began at the London Palladium in February 2011.
She was still at school and beat 9000 other hopefuls to star alongside theatre legend Michael Crawford in the title role. She continued as Dorothy until 5 February 2012, before joining the cast of Les Misérables as Eponine till June 2013
Joe Orton’s farce What the Butler Saw premiered at the Queen’s Theatre in London on 5 March 1969 – his last play before he was bludgeoned to death by his partner Kenneth Halliwell in August 1967 at the age of 34. In a short, but prolific, career he became known for scandalous black comedies often referred to as “Ortonesque” characterised by dark yet farcical cynicism.
In 2012 a revival was staged at the Vaudeville Theatre, featuring Omid Djalili, Tim McInnerny, Samantha Bond, Georgina Moffett, Jason Thorpe and Mick Hendry who all signed my sketch in July.
Aptly named, Samantha Bond featured in four 007 films as Miss Moneypenny during the Pierce Brosnan era between 1995 and 2002. The popular British actress has been a regular on the West End boards over the past five years. In an interview for WhatsOnStage, Samantha said, “I try and do a play a year. It’s my favourite place, nothing compares to live theatre… where I feel most at home, but it does scare the shit out of me.”
Following the revival of Tom Stoppard’s classic comedy of ideas Arcadia at the Duke of York’s in 2009, she did two shifts at the Vaudeville Theatre, with Oscar Wilde’s The Ideal Husband (with her husband Alexander Hanson) and What the Butler Saw before returning to the Duke of York’s for Passion Play in May 2013.
Her next appearance will be the comedy musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels at the Savoy next month. So, plenty of opportunities to get Samantha to sign a sketch…. In this case she ‘graphed it at the Vaudeville during What The Butler Saw in July 2012.
Ken Stott, the Scot, better known to cinema goers as the dwarf Balin in the current Hobbit trilogy, is an accomplished theatre thespian. His most recent West End appearance was the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Theatre critic Tim Walker, writing in The Telegraph said, “Good for Lindsay Posner, the director of this pitch perfect production for not choosing a big star name to play the title role but a proper, solid stage actor in Ken Stott”.
I sketched Ken as the tragic protagonist Eddie when he starred in the revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s in early 2009. He played an Italian-American longshoreman on the New York docks. The production drew media attention when Ken halted a performance to demand a group of rowdy school children be removed from the audience, who supported him by shouting, “out, out, out.” After a 15 minute stand-off the offending juveniles were removed…
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