Play From London

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32306, 26 May 1970, Page 13

Play From London

A new play which was on the London stage only last November is to open in Christchurch on Saturday in a production by Yvette Bromley for the Risingholme Theatre Centre. The play, “The Sleepers’ Den,” by Peter Gill, is the first of four new plays Mrs Bromley will produce for the Risingholme group this year as a result of her visit to Britain last year. Mrs Bromley saw the play in the tiny Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, London, and was so impressed by it that she got in touch with the playwright and asked him for the amateur rights in New Zealand. Set in one room, the play was described by a London reviewer as a “still life of t woman who retreats from the lovelessness and poverty of her days, as her mother has done before her, into sleep and schizophrenia.” The people occupying the sleepers’ den are the Shannons, an impoverished Roman Catholic family living in Cardiff, although in Mrs Bromley’s production the geography is not important, and no attempt has been made to persuade the cast to speak with a Welsh accent. The main characters, played by Rosemary Nicoresti, is Joan Shannon, who has to bear the brunt of her family’s problems—attending to her bedridden old mother (played by Myrtle Kesteven), satisfying her little daughter (Stephanie Sutton or Catherine Hadley), feeding her surly son (Alfred Taylor), fending off the landlord’s agent (Howard Boddington), and maintaining a semblance of respectability to impress the local social worker (Pat Cleese). Mrs Bromley says the play is mainly about human relationships, and about the ways in which people react to each other. “The problems of a woman such as Mrs Shannon, weighed down with emotional and financial difficulties, are

tangible human problems. They mean something to all of us,” she said. One of the novel aspects of the production is that it does not use the stage. An area has been set up in the auditorium, and all the action will take place there, emphasising the “intimate” nature of the play.

However, the experiment will be carried no further than that; Mrs Bromley says she has no intention of putting her audiences under the microscope on stage. The play will open on Saturday in the Risingholme Theatre Centre in Reeves Road, and will be performed also on Sunday and Monday.