22nd to 29th May 2010
Click here to list Plays beginning with L

BILL  BRAY  introduces Anthony Minghella

Our next playwright came from a family of Italian immigrants who settled in the Isle of Wight and set up an ice cream factory  at Ryde. The name may be familiar to those who take Isle of Wight  holidays,  but ice cream manufacture wasn’t top of the career list for Anthony, familiarly known as ‘Ant’.

Twenty five years ago I heard a lot about Ant from Stuart Cosgrove, a former colleague, who had taken an English and Drama degree at the University of Hull with a  remarkable group of undergraduates including Minghella. Stuart himself was a work colleague for only two years before he progressed to Head of Programmes for Channel 4 TV Scotland. John Guare, in his play, Six Degrees of Separation, puts forward the idea that everybody on the planet is separated by only six links to everybody else. Although I never met Minghella I am separated from him, through Cosgrove, by just two links. Rubbing shoulders with the famous by virtual reality!

Ant’s West End debut play was Made in Bangkok, which won the London Critics award in 1986 for Best New Play. He had already received the Critics’ Award for Most Promising Playwright, in 1984, for A Little Like Drowning, for which he followed the advice that playwrights should write from their own experience, choosing to dramatise a family secret handed down from his Italian grandfather. Minghella didn’t stay in theatre, deciding that there was more international recognition to be gained through cinema. He had worked in TV using his writing skill on screenplays and from that he moved to take on also directing. He had film successes as writer/director with The English Patient and  Cold Mountain and as writer on the musical version of Fellini’s  film 8½, renamed Nine, directed by Rob Marshall.  The film depicts the dangerous entanglements a director may risk during the intense creative process of working intimately with glamorous and attractive people.  I should say that Ant, although familiar with these temptations, was happily married with two children.  Sadly he died two years ago, aged 54, after complications following routine surgery.

A Little Like Drowning is a warm, human play from the pen of a man whose sensitivity and deftness in writing about love is demonstrated also in Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Director, MIKE  HIGGINSON, introduces the play

I imagine that most of you reading this article will not have heard of this play before, but isn’t that a great reason to come and experience the thrill of an unknown story unfolding in front of you? I have read (or tried to read) scores of scripts over the years, trying to find plays which will stretch me as a director, challenge the actors and inspire and enthral the audience. And this is a script which I keep coming back to, because it certainly fulfils the first two criteria and because, with the resources of GWT behind us, I am confident we will achieve the third.

I am delighted that you will have the opportunity of seeing some of our teenage members, graduating from the Youth Group, to fill key parts as some of the younger members of the Italian family around which the play revolves, as well as a couple of old stalwarts in Maurice Tripp and Graeme Horner playing cameo roles!

I hope you will take the opportunity to see a Minghella play, as sadly there are not too many to see! When he died so suddenly in March 2008, he had written only a handful of scripts for the stage, and just as this is my debut at the GWT as a director, this is also his debut at GWT as a playwright. What he had received acclamation for was, of course, the quality of his cinematic and television output, most notably with The English Patient (for which he won an Oscar as Director), The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain and the BAFTA winning Truly, Madly, Deeply.

A Little Like Drowning was first staged in 1982, and then produced on Radio 4 in 1989 starring Alan Rickman. Minghella himself said that the play was prompted by a conundrum in his family history, where his grandfather appeared to have maintained a loving relationship with two women over the larger part of his life. The play spans the years 1926 to 1982, as we look back from the perspective of one of those two women, Leonora, through her eyes as a 72-year old woman living in the England of the 1980’s. From her wedding night in Italy, aged 16, we follow her and her young husband to England and to Ireland. We follow them, his lover, and their children and grandchildren through humour and heartbreak. We go from the beach to a café and a concert, to see a wedding and a funeral, but always back to the beach and to the sea as the comedy and tragedy of the family history is laid bare in front of us.

I know you will be touched by the story, that you will enjoy the gentle and ironic humour; that you will spot characters and situations that may have affected you and yours and which will make you nod with recognition, but without being shocked or offended. In a season filled with great period classics, here is a modern story about real people which I hope you will come and share, living with the actors through the emotions of this everyday eternal love triangle and its effects on the families it has created.