Walking on Water - White Bear Theatre
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
THE WHITE Bear Theatre’s 20th anniversary season opens with Paul Minx’s Walking on Water, starring legendary British actress Susannah York as Mama Palmer. It will run from January 8 to January 28, 2008.
Betsy, a self-styled fashion designer, has come to the American Midwest at the request of her sister Frances. Their mother has shown increasing signs of Alzheimer’s and has acquired a habit of digging up long dead family pets in the back garden.
Frances feels she can’t cope. Moreover, she feels it isn’t fair that she’s asked to. Betsy, who ran off to California, intends staying just one weekend, but provoked by the efforts of her sick mother and Betsy’s fifteen year old daughter Henny, she soon finds herself forced to deal with the truths of a past she’s been avoiding.
York’s career – spanning stage, television and screen – began in the sixties with films such as The Greengage Summer, Tom Jones, Tunes of Glory (alongside Alec Guinness and John Mills), A Man For All Seasons, The Killing of Sister George and Battle of Britain.
She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and famously did not attend the ceremony, declaring it offended her to be nominated without being asked. In 2007, she toured nationally with The Wings of a Dove, a stage adaptation of the Henry James novel, as well as appearing in Ben Ellis’s The Final Cut at Theatre 503.
Lolly Susi will direct a cast that also includes Melanie Hudson (as Betsy Baumgartner), Sarah Berger (as Frances Palmer) and Victoria Yeates (as Henrietta “Henny”).
American playwright Minx’s four-hander arrives in London following Off Broadway readings involving Calista Flockhart, Dorothy Loudon and Anne Meara. His most recent UK work, See How Beautiful I Am, played at the Bush Theatre in 2001 after a run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Walking on Water is produced by King William Productions in association with the White Bear Theatre.
Tickets: £12, £10 concessions (except Saturdays).
For more information call the box office on 020 7793 9193 or visit the website.