AWARD-winning plays and playwrights is the focus of the current season at Leamington’s Loft Theatre.
Following January’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, next up in the main house is Harold Pinter’s most performed play ‘The Caretaker’. This year marks the 60th anniversary of its first performance.
Hot on its heels, the Loft welcomes Apollo Theatre Company – for one night only – with its stage production of the radio comedy classic ‘Round The Horne’.
Those who attended the Loft’s recent music hall production will already have seen a sketch from this most famous of radio programmes. In its heyday it had audiences of 15 million tuning in on Sunday lunchtime to listen to this masterclass of comedy.
In the Studio, William Wilkinson directs ‘The Children’ by Lucy Kirkwood. She is one of the most acclaimed playwrights of her generation, with her work being performed in the West End and on Broadway. She has two plays listed in The Guardian’s top ten best plays of the 21st century, with ‘The Children’ in third position.
The Loft’s Easter production will be Howard Brenton’s ‘Anne Boleyn’. The play, commissioned for The Globe Theatre in 2011, shakes up the popular image of Henry VIII’s second wife. Here she is seen not as a doomed siren but a great English heroine.
May brings the chance to see Joe Orton’s ‘Loot’. Irreverent, full of sharp one-liners and shockingly laugh-out-loud funny, it has a corpse, a bank robbery, a dodgy policeman, a nurse on the make and no moral compass whatsoever.
This is followed in June by Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Winslow Boy’. Based on a real life legal case, the action takes place in a family home and not in a court room.
The season is rounded off in July with a stage adaptation of ‘The Great Gatsby’. This play with music and dance highlights the decadence of the Roaring 20s.
Visit lofttheatrecompany.com for full details.
