Above the Stag Theatre - Autumn 2015
Season preview
TWO award-winning directors launch the Autumn season at Above the Stag Theatre bringing new perspectives to Australian play The Sum of Us and a re-imagining of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter.
The Sum of Us, Australian writer David Stevens’ comedy-drama exploring the moving and sometimes fractious relationship between a widower and his gay son, runs from September 9 to October 4.
Gene David Kirk, Associate Director at the Drayton Theatre and former Artistic Director at Jermyn Street Theatre, directs an all Australian cast.
After meeting in a local pub, Jeff and a young gardener, Greg, hit it off and begin to date. When he meets Jeff’s stubborn, opinionated Dad however, Greg begins to back off. Meanwhile Dad too has a new flame: a woman he met through a dating service. Put off by Jeff’s homosexuality, prosaic Joyce too pulls away just before a surprising and poignant ending.
The Sum of Us was an Off-Broadway hit and later a film starring Russell Crowe.
A Brief Gay Encounter, in which multi award-winning writer/director Phil Willmott takes the world of Brief Encounter as a setting for a completely new play imagining the kind of gay romance Noel Coward and his contemporaries were forbidden to write, runs from October 14 to November 15.
A chance encounter at a railway station in 1945 leads two men to consider how much they must sacrifice in order to be together. This evocative, heartbreaking production invites audiences to consider how far we’ve come and how much we’ve still in common with our grandfather’s generation.
In the early 1940s, Noel Coward wrote Brief Encounter, the celebrated celluloid weepy in which characters played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, and contemplate an affair in a suffocating suburban world where it will mean disgrace and ruin.
Noel Coward was gay and many commentators believe the hit film reflects his own frustrations at a time when homosexuality was illegal and it was impossible for one man to openly love another, or to represent this on stage or screen.
And this year’s adult panto is Tinderella, Cinders Slips It In. Written by Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper (their seventh panto at Above the Stag) and directed by Andrew Beckett (his fourth panto at the venue), it runs from November 26 to January 16, 2016.
Rent Boy: The Musical continues at Above the Stag Theatre until August 22, 2015.
For more information or to book tickets, visit www.abovethestag.com/.