Hangover Square - Finborough Theatre
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
AS PART of this year’s Earl’s Court Community Festival, Finborough Theatre is putting on local author Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square from July 9 to August 2, 2008.
Set in darkest Earl’s Court just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the production is a classic story of loneliness, obsession and addiction set against an atmospheric film noir backdrop.
Alcoholic George Harvey Bone is hopelessly infatuated with a young actress, Netta, who is cool, hopelessly desirable and utterly contemptuous of him. As Bone faces “the end of hope and love” as he falls under Netta’s spell, he is cast adrift in an unsettling, seductive, darkly comic world of seedy saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers – except in his “dead” moments, when something goes click in his head and he realizes, without doubt, that he must kill her….
Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was the author of Rope (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Gaslight (recently revived at The Old Vic). His work has undergone a huge revival in recent years and, in 2007, the audio version of Hangover Square was Book of the Week in The Sunday Times.
The novel is adapted by actress and writer Fidelis Morgan. Her stage plays include adaptations of famous novels, including Pamela and Hangover Square (last seen at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1990). Her non-fiction includes The Female Wits, the first study of female playwrights of the Restoration stage.
Director Gemma Fairlie returns to the Finborough Theatre after her world premiere production of James Graham’s Eden’s Empire, a Finborough Theatre commission.
The cast includes Clare Calbraith, Jamie De Courcey, Antony Eden, Caroline Faber, Matthew Flynn, Jonathan Kemp, Gyuri Sarossy.
Calbraith’s many credits include The Devil’s League at Derby Playhouse), The Merchant of Venice, King Lear and The Mysteries at Northern Broadsides, and Don Juan as part of the English Touring Theatre. She was also a regular on Coronation Street and Heartbeat.
Jamie De Courcey’s many credits include A Voyage Round My Father at Wyndham’s Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse and An Inspector Calls at the National Theatre and Birmingham Rep.
Antony Eden, meanwhile, has appeared in Mrs Warren’s Profession at Edinburgh Lyceum and Nottingham Playhouse and Les Miserables for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Click here, to find out more about this year’s Earl’s Court Community Festival