Post by marion on Jul 10, 2024 18:48:17 GMT
I’m sure some weeks ago there was a discussion about whatever had become of Honeysuckle Weeks. Well, I can report back that she is in Richmond, appearing in the UK tour of this play, 😂😂.
This play is by Emlyn Williams and dates from 1950. It concerns a Nobel Prize winning author (which was unbelievable in itself) who is about to be knighted. Will Trenting (Ayden Callaghan) writes books set in a rather louche milieu, but what his public don’t know is that he leads a double life, spending time in Rotherhithe where he attends sex parties. His wife (Honeysuckle Weeks) is aware of the Rotherhithe connection but sort of overlooks it. We meet two of his companions from there, his publisher, Secretary and son, but then an unknown chap arrives (Narinder Samra) and tells Will that the last woman he had sex with (a supposed 24 year old in furs) was in fact his 14 year old daughter. The story then concerns poor Will, what to do, pay blackmail, does the father actually want money. The father then rings the DPP (which raised a laugh) and Will is exposed to the press and public.
I didn’t know what to make of this at all. It didn’t help that Ayden Callaghan played him as a petulant man-baby. And absolutely no one had any care for the underage girl, simply about protecting Will and his family. By the end I couldn’t care what happened to any of them. I found it very hard to equate this version of Ayden Callaghan with the guy playing the lead in The Bodyguard tour! But the rest of the cast were fine, except for the ghastly 15 year old son. He seemed to wander across the stage at scene changes with a symbolic curtain and there was also a sort of cylinder for the boy at the start and the writer at the end. But it was lost on me. It got moderate applause from the sparse audience. Friends of mine saw his play The Corn is Green at the National and said it was fantastic, but that may have been due to Nicola Walker’s presence. This was a disappointment really because no one cared about the girl and the interpretation of the writer made it impossible to care about him. As for the supposed sympathy we were expected to feel against unwarranted press intrusion, well I felt he had it coming, 😂.
This play is by Emlyn Williams and dates from 1950. It concerns a Nobel Prize winning author (which was unbelievable in itself) who is about to be knighted. Will Trenting (Ayden Callaghan) writes books set in a rather louche milieu, but what his public don’t know is that he leads a double life, spending time in Rotherhithe where he attends sex parties. His wife (Honeysuckle Weeks) is aware of the Rotherhithe connection but sort of overlooks it. We meet two of his companions from there, his publisher, Secretary and son, but then an unknown chap arrives (Narinder Samra) and tells Will that the last woman he had sex with (a supposed 24 year old in furs) was in fact his 14 year old daughter. The story then concerns poor Will, what to do, pay blackmail, does the father actually want money. The father then rings the DPP (which raised a laugh) and Will is exposed to the press and public.
I didn’t know what to make of this at all. It didn’t help that Ayden Callaghan played him as a petulant man-baby. And absolutely no one had any care for the underage girl, simply about protecting Will and his family. By the end I couldn’t care what happened to any of them. I found it very hard to equate this version of Ayden Callaghan with the guy playing the lead in The Bodyguard tour! But the rest of the cast were fine, except for the ghastly 15 year old son. He seemed to wander across the stage at scene changes with a symbolic curtain and there was also a sort of cylinder for the boy at the start and the writer at the end. But it was lost on me. It got moderate applause from the sparse audience. Friends of mine saw his play The Corn is Green at the National and said it was fantastic, but that may have been due to Nicola Walker’s presence. This was a disappointment really because no one cared about the girl and the interpretation of the writer made it impossible to care about him. As for the supposed sympathy we were expected to feel against unwarranted press intrusion, well I felt he had it coming, 😂.