Prick Up Your Ears - Lucas and New star
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
MATT Lucas (as Kenneth Halliwell) and Chris New (as playwright Joe Orton) will star in Daniel Kramer’s production of Simon Bent’s new play Prick Up Your Ears, which runs at the Comedy Theatre from September 30 (previews from September 17) to December 6, 2009.
Inspired exclusively by the John Lahr biography and the diaries of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears examines the private lives of these two extraordinary men.
In 1962, Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton – RADA graduates, aspiring playwrights, and sometime lovers – plot their rightful place at the centre of London’s literary scene whilst engaged in a secret crusade to “improve” the local library books, all in the worst possible taste of course, and acting out their own versions of popular radio dramas… with an extra dash of innuendo.
But after a short interlude at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Joe is about to become the greatest and most notorious comic playwright since Oscar Wilde, while Ken stays indoors re-decorating, reduced to sharing Joe’s success with their neighbour, Mrs Corden, over tea and a slice of battenburg.
Described as a darkly funny and moving play, Prick Up Your Ears imagines what really happened when, after years of creative collaboration, the door slammed shut and Kenneth was home alone. It tells the sensational story behind the domestic life of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, holed up in a tiny flat in Islington, trading well-trodden insults and hilarious put-downs like any old married couple.
Although Matt Lucas is probably best known for the multi award-winning comedy series Little Britain which he co-created with his comedy partner David Walliams, his television credits also include Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, Shooting Stars, Kath and Kim, Gavin and Stacy, Wind in the Willows, Casanova, King Arthur’s Disasters, Catterick, Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, Rock Profile, Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes and Sunnyside Farm.
While on the big screen, he has appeared in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Shaun of the Dead, Cold and Dark, Plunkett and Macleane and Jilting Joe.
As well as the touring production Little Britain Live, Lucas’ theatre credits include Taboo (West End) and Troilus and Cressida (Oxford Stage Company), as well as many live performances at the Edinburgh Festival.
Chris New‘s theatre credits include Daniel Kramer’s production of Bent (Trafalgar Studios), Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors (Royal Shakespeare Company), Hayfever (Royal Exchange Theatre), The Reporter (National Theatre) and, most recently, Amazonia (Young Vic).
On television, he has appeared in Doctors, Silent Witness, Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me and Casualty.
Simon Bent‘s other plays include Goldhawk Road, Wasted, The Escapologist, Shelter, Under the Black Flag, Accomplices and Sugar Sugar. He also adapted John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany (National Theatre) and Elling (Bush Theatre and Trafalgar Studios). And his television writing includes the BAFTA nominated Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, Beau Brummell, The Yellow House and Sex, the City and Me.
Theatre and Opera Director Daniel Kramer‘s credits include Pictures from an Exhibition (a co-production between Sadler’s Wells and the Young Vic); Punch & Judy (English National Opera at the Young Vic) for which he received the South Bank Show Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera; Angels in America (Headlong); Woyzeck (New York); Bent (Trafalgar Studios); Hair and Woyzeck (Gate Theatre); and Through the Leaves (Southwark Playhouse and Duchess Theatre).
His forthcoming projects include Prima Donna, a new opera by Rufus Wainwright, which premieres at the Manchester International Festival next month and, later this year, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle for English National Opera.
Joe Orton‘s works include The Ruffian on the Stair, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw (plays); Head to Toe and Between us Girls (novels).
Prick Up Your Ears is produced in the West End by Sonia Friedman Productions, Kim Poster for Stanhope Productions and Lee Menzies – with the full support of the Orton Estate, including Leonie Orton, Joe Orton’s younger sister.
Casting for the third and final role of Mrs Corden, the neighbour, will be announced shortly.
A new musical, Too Close to the Sun, a fictional account of the events leading up to the death of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, precedes Prick Up Your Ears at the Comedy Theatre.
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